OK, so you're issuing another "Objective-C is crap for the same reasons C++ and Java are crap" objection. I don't disagree with that, but it's really beside the point. The discussion wasn't about how Cocoa should be built around Common Lisp or Ruby, was it?
Yeah, well, maybe for the 0.01% of people with a $10K HDTV, DVD is insufficient.
However, on my regular HDTV a good DVD looks stunning. I won't be upgrading until there's at least a region-free Bluray/HD-DVD player available, plus a boatload of content.
One of the perceived failures of first-generation DVD was that its encryption mechanism of choice, called Content Scramble System (CSS), was spectacularly defeated, with the result being that the industry was forced to permanently and irreversibly support a now-worthless encryption scheme.
Only the player manufacturers were forced to keep supporting it. There's absolutely no need to use CSS on DVDs. In fact, there are commercial movie DVDs out there that aren't CSS encoded.
It's no coincidence that countries which don't pay much bother to the Berne Convention and other similar international agreements are by and large shitty places to live.
Singapore didn't sign on to the Berne Convention until 1998. That was after they had transformed a largely agrarian society into a technological powerhouse in the space of less than a century.
It's not a coincidence, in the sense that the USA pressures any country that wishes to trade internationally to implement copyright protection.
Singapore did the right thing, and built a strong economy first before implementing copyright--like the USA did. Russia made the mistake of implementing copyright as part of the "market reforms" that the west told them would transform their country, and look at their economy now. So now we're going to tell them that the problem is they haven't tried it hard enough...
It's C, of course it has a terrible type system. That's par for the course whether it's Objective-C or C++ or ANSI C. What do you think is not 'true' about its polymorphism?
It seems to me that people are saying "Don't use Objective-C, it has [list of defects], use C++ or Java"--and ignoring that C++ and Java have most or all of the same defects.
e.g. C++ and C don't have garbage collection either, and Java has wretched performance. (I can only think of one Java application that approaches the responsiveness of a native Objective-C Cocoa application; and why the hell is ANT so goddamn slow, even compared to Rant?)
If you have an application where you need a tight loop calling a particular piece of code, and profiling shows that Objective-C overheads are significant in that case, then you optimize that piece of code to remove the overheads. That doesn't mean Objective-C is too slow for use; worrying about method call overheads when choosing your language is just a classic case of premature optimization.
I wrote a screensaver in Objective-C. The particle system was Objective-C. I wondered if dynamic method dispatch would be a performance problem, but profiling revealed that it simply wasn't an issue. So I maintain that outside of highly specialized contexts, Objective-C performance isn't a problem. And where it is a problem, you can optimize the one or two small pieces of code causing the issue.
If you look closly to objective C, it is really not a language, it is just C with a enhanced macro pre processor.
C++ started out as C with a special preprocessor. So what?
Performance is ABYSMAL compared to any modern language because message sends (the objective C equiv of a method call) has to go through a dispatch map.
I'd be interested to see some up-to-date figures to back up your assertion. GCC 3.1 gave a 2x speed increase in method dispatch, and GCC 4.0 has -fobjc-direct-dispatch.
msgc_ObjSend without the GCC 4.0 optimization is 22 cycles. Somehow I doubt that's really your big performance issue.
Modern languages like Java, C# provide all the dynamsism of objective C, but do it effciently thougth vtables and reflection.
This is the usual Java/C++ argument of 'There is no value in dynamic typing, because I can write a program that does the same thing using static typing'. Well, yes, and I can write a program that does the same thing in machine code, but that doesn't mean high level languages have no value.
Some of us like having introspection, metaclasses, true parametric polymorphism and so on, without having to implement ugly workarounds. Personally, I think that ubiquitous (implicit) dynamic typing is a major aid to code reuse and software development agility.
It's worth noting that the NSA isn't obscured in Google Maps. Why not? Because they have actual security, and understand that if a mere aerial photograph is enough to in any way increase a terrorist's chances of success, it means your security is completely inadequate.
Similarly, you'll note that there are nice high resolution maps of Area 51 available to anyone who's interested. Try using the map to get to anywhere it shows, and you'll find out why nobody has needed to try and ban the maps.
The way I see it, India has just telegraphed to the world "Hey, the security of our Parliament is completely inadequate!" They should be hoping no terrorist is reading the story.
I really hope Apple drops their hardware and migrates Cocoa to Windows and Linux.
A more realistic goal would be for Linux to drop KDE and GNOME and focus on GNUStep. That way you could have a free open source equivalent of Cocoa, with source code compatibility.
Of course, it'll never happen. Too many egos are invested in going in other directions.
sounds pretty much like taxation without representation
Like that's going to stop any state government. The federal government taxes without representation too, has done for decades and nobody seems to care.
I've stopped buying DVDs because I don't want to re-buy once HD DVDs become available
I don't want to re-buy when HD-DVDs become available either. That's why I'm still buying DVDs.
That is, when HD-DVDs become available they will be so crippled with DRM I won't want to buy them. DVD is quite good enough with a good upconverter, so...
Blockbuster is doomed and bleeding money, but still pulls in 10x Netflix's revenue.
Let's see... A billion dollars of revenue and big losses, or a tenth of the revenue and millions in profit...
Netflix is for people who know what they want to watch in advance and watch a ton of movies.
Or people who want to watch their movies uncensored. Or people who care about video quality, and don't want to pay out the ass for HD. Or people who actually like the extra material found on DVDs. Or people who feel they already pay too damn much money to the cable company, who keep jacking up their fees every quarter, unlike Netflix.
They were stupid not to build loyalty, and eventually they'll go out of business or get snapped up.
Oh, it was worse than that. Long after there were DVD players in all the stores and every movie company had released movies on DVD, Blockbuster still didn't offer DVD rentals at all. I kept going in and checking every month or two. They were literally the last video store in my city to offer DVD rentals.
I tried Netflix because Blockbuster were simply uninterested in renting DVDs to me. I stayed with Netflix for the selection and the convenience. Once Blockbuster lost me as a customer, they would have had to do something really spectacular to win me back.
Apple had discovered that Microsoft had stolen QuickTime source code and used it in Video for Windows. The trial was going very well for Apple. Yet it was suddenly dropped when Microsoft agreed to make the "investment" in Apple.
Ask yourself this: if the "investment" wasn't under threat, why do you think the full terms were kept so secret?
No, the guy's right. Not too long ago I discovered a real estate company I was dealing with produced its documents using nroff, edited using vi. Really. It worked well for them, so why change?
It's standard economic theory that mature markets tend to settle down to 2 major competitors, with a handful of single-digit-percentage minor players.
This seems to apply even to free software.
Other examples are Ruby vs Python C++ vs Objective-C Java vs.NET sendmail vs postfix MySQL vs PostgreSQL
And commercial software:
DB2 vs Oracle Notes vs Exchange
My theory is that every good bit of free software needs a more popular crappy competitor. The more popular crappy software keeps the idiots away from the good software, allowing it to stay good.
Ruby does meet your needs. That's exactly what I use it for most of the time. I'm gradually converting all my Perl scripts to Ruby, cleaning them up and making them OO on the way. Fetching RPMs for SuSE boxes from restricted FTP sites, assembling newsletters from bits of web and mailing them out via SMTP, reporting on disk usage by directory, and so on.
Ruby has very easy to understand scoping, not much syntax to keep track of, a clean implementation of OO, dynamic typing, and interfaces to most POSIX stuff you'll need. Take a look at ruby-doc.org for the standard library and core Ruby documentation. The online free 1st edition of "Programming Ruby" is all the tutorial and reference you'll need to decide whether you like it. It doesn't force a particular style on you, though there is a clear style favored by the community.
Some of the library documentation is a bit lacking, but people are working on that. (I recently documented the fcntl and/etc APIs, for example.)
If the language is so rotten, why do you think that it's so incredibly popular?
It has had longer to get popular. At the time I learnt Perl, it was the only decent multi-platform scripting language. However, that doesn't mean it's any good compared to the alternatives available now.
Why is it so *wildly* portable (even moreso than Java)?
Careful programming. I'm not denying that the C source code of Perl itself is well-written code.
Why do huge sites like Amazon.com and Ticketmaster.com and Slashdot.org rely on it for their core business?
Again, historical reasons. But we're even starting to see people moving from Perl and PHP to Ruby on Rails. (e.g. cdbaby.com)
What other language with humble beginnings found its way into, well, everything?
BASIC and C. BASIC is in everything from single-chip microcontrollers to groupware systems and web browsers; C is available on practically every hardware platform known to man, even in cut-down form for LEGO.
Why does every other language feel it necessary to *copy* Perl Regular Expressions
Same reason Perl felt it necessary to *copy* regular expressions from awk. They're damn useful.
Secondly, because the PCRE package provides a good, fast, free, open source implementation, written by someone who actually knows how to write good secure code. So rather than reinvent that unpleasant wheel, lots of projects just use PCRE as their regex engine, and 'accidentally' get Perl 5 regex features.
But for what it's worth, Ruby doesn't have all the Perl regex functionality exposed, and provides a nicer object-oriented API for match results.
And I don't see anyone rushing to implement all the new syntax of Perl 6 regexes.
I've found that over 90% of the people who publically state that they've migrated from Perl to Ruby or Python or PHP were drawn in by features of those languages that they *thought* Perl didn't have.
Not me. I migrated (to Ruby) after years of using Perl because Perl's syntax is so horrible and complicated that I never managed to learn a lot of the important features I knew Perl had--like the ability to do object-oriented programming.
Ruby has much simpler syntax and scoping. That means it gets out of the way and lets me write code. I know that everything I write could be done in Perl, and I don't care.
I also know that Perl has things Ruby lacks. But they're things I don't need that just make the language uglier and more complicated. I don't need three or four different ways to pass parameters to a function. There's a point at which "There's more than one way to do it" becomes pathological and bad for the language. It became clear from Larry's writings that Perl 6 was going to have even more syntactic complexity, so I decided it was time to leave.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so you're issuing another "Objective-C is crap for the same reasons C++ and Java are crap" objection. I don't disagree with that, but it's really beside the point. The discussion wasn't about how Cocoa should be built around Common Lisp or Ruby, was it?
Yeah, well, maybe for the 0.01% of people with a $10K HDTV, DVD is insufficient.
However, on my regular HDTV a good DVD looks stunning. I won't be upgrading until there's at least a region-free Bluray/HD-DVD player available, plus a boatload of content.
Only the player manufacturers were forced to keep supporting it. There's absolutely no need to use CSS on DVDs. In fact, there are commercial movie DVDs out there that aren't CSS encoded.
Singapore didn't sign on to the Berne Convention until 1998. That was after they had transformed a largely agrarian society into a technological powerhouse in the space of less than a century.
It's not a coincidence, in the sense that the USA pressures any country that wishes to trade internationally to implement copyright protection.
Singapore did the right thing, and built a strong economy first before implementing copyright--like the USA did. Russia made the mistake of implementing copyright as part of the "market reforms" that the west told them would transform their country, and look at their economy now. So now we're going to tell them that the problem is they haven't tried it hard enough...
It's C, of course it has a terrible type system. That's par for the course whether it's Objective-C or C++ or ANSI C. What do you think is not 'true' about its polymorphism?
It seems to me that people are saying "Don't use Objective-C, it has [list of defects], use C++ or Java"--and ignoring that C++ and Java have most or all of the same defects.
e.g. C++ and C don't have garbage collection either, and Java has wretched performance. (I can only think of one Java application that approaches the responsiveness of a native Objective-C Cocoa application; and why the hell is ANT so goddamn slow, even compared to Rant?)
If you have an application where you need a tight loop calling a particular piece of code, and profiling shows that Objective-C overheads are significant in that case, then you optimize that piece of code to remove the overheads. That doesn't mean Objective-C is too slow for use; worrying about method call overheads when choosing your language is just a classic case of premature optimization.
I wrote a screensaver in Objective-C. The particle system was Objective-C. I wondered if dynamic method dispatch would be a performance problem, but profiling revealed that it simply wasn't an issue. So I maintain that outside of highly specialized contexts, Objective-C performance isn't a problem. And where it is a problem, you can optimize the one or two small pieces of code causing the issue.
Mach's dynamic linking overheads apply to all languages, though, not just Objective-C.
C++ started out as C with a special preprocessor. So what?
I'd be interested to see some up-to-date figures to back up your assertion. GCC 3.1 gave a 2x speed increase in method dispatch, and GCC 4.0 has -fobjc-direct-dispatch.
msgc_ObjSend without the GCC 4.0 optimization is 22 cycles. Somehow I doubt that's really your big performance issue.
This is the usual Java/C++ argument of 'There is no value in dynamic typing, because I can write a program that does the same thing using static typing'. Well, yes, and I can write a program that does the same thing in machine code, but that doesn't mean high level languages have no value.
Some of us like having introspection, metaclasses, true parametric polymorphism and so on, without having to implement ugly workarounds. Personally, I think that ubiquitous (implicit) dynamic typing is a major aid to code reuse and software development agility.
It's worth noting that the NSA isn't obscured in Google Maps. Why not? Because they have actual security, and understand that if a mere aerial photograph is enough to in any way increase a terrorist's chances of success, it means your security is completely inadequate.
Similarly, you'll note that there are nice high resolution maps of Area 51 available to anyone who's interested. Try using the map to get to anywhere it shows, and you'll find out why nobody has needed to try and ban the maps.
The way I see it, India has just telegraphed to the world "Hey, the security of our Parliament is completely inadequate!" They should be hoping no terrorist is reading the story.
A more realistic goal would be for Linux to drop KDE and GNOME and focus on GNUStep. That way you could have a free open source equivalent of Cocoa, with source code compatibility.
Of course, it'll never happen. Too many egos are invested in going in other directions.
Like that's going to stop any state government. The federal government taxes without representation too, has done for decades and nobody seems to care.
Face it, the American revolution failed.
I don't want to re-buy when HD-DVDs become available either. That's why I'm still buying DVDs.
That is, when HD-DVDs become available they will be so crippled with DRM I won't want to buy them. DVD is quite good enough with a good upconverter, so...
Let's see... A billion dollars of revenue and big losses, or a tenth of the revenue and millions in profit...
Or people who want to watch their movies uncensored. Or people who care about video quality, and don't want to pay out the ass for HD. Or people who actually like the extra material found on DVDs. Or people who feel they already pay too damn much money to the cable company, who keep jacking up their fees every quarter, unlike Netflix.
Oh, it was worse than that. Long after there were DVD players in all the stores and every movie company had released movies on DVD, Blockbuster still didn't offer DVD rentals at all. I kept going in and checking every month or two. They were literally the last video store in my city to offer DVD rentals.
I tried Netflix because Blockbuster were simply uninterested in renting DVDs to me. I stayed with Netflix for the selection and the convenience. Once Blockbuster lost me as a customer, they would have had to do something really spectacular to win me back.
Apple had discovered that Microsoft had stolen QuickTime source code and used it in Video for Windows. The trial was going very well for Apple. Yet it was suddenly dropped when Microsoft agreed to make the "investment" in Apple.
Ask yourself this: if the "investment" wasn't under threat, why do you think the full terms were kept so secret?
This article to return to the front page of Slashdot in a day or two.
Someone call the WILDFIRE team and start getting them decontaminated...
No, the guy's right. Not too long ago I discovered a real estate company I was dealing with produced its documents using nroff, edited using vi. Really. It worked well for them, so why change?
Who are these people who call themselves nerds and don't know that a 2K7 resistor is 2700 ohms, not 2007. Sheesh.
Actually the parent has it right.
.NET
It's standard economic theory that mature markets tend to settle down to 2 major competitors, with a handful of single-digit-percentage minor players.
This seems to apply even to free software.
Other examples are
Ruby vs Python
C++ vs Objective-C
Java vs
sendmail vs postfix
MySQL vs PostgreSQL
And commercial software:
DB2 vs Oracle
Notes vs Exchange
My theory is that every good bit of free software needs a more popular crappy competitor. The more popular crappy software keeps the idiots away from the good software, allowing it to stay good.
Just like the real world, in other words.
Ruby does meet your needs. That's exactly what I use it for most of the time. I'm gradually converting all my Perl scripts to Ruby, cleaning them up and making them OO on the way. Fetching RPMs for SuSE boxes from restricted FTP sites, assembling newsletters from bits of web and mailing them out via SMTP, reporting on disk usage by directory, and so on.
/etc APIs, for example.)
Ruby has very easy to understand scoping, not much syntax to keep track of, a clean implementation of OO, dynamic typing, and interfaces to most POSIX stuff you'll need. Take a look at ruby-doc.org for the standard library and core Ruby documentation. The online free 1st edition of "Programming Ruby" is all the tutorial and reference you'll need to decide whether you like it. It doesn't force a particular style on you, though there is a clear style favored by the community.
Some of the library documentation is a bit lacking, but people are working on that. (I recently documented the fcntl and
It has had longer to get popular. At the time I learnt Perl, it was the only decent multi-platform scripting language. However, that doesn't mean it's any good compared to the alternatives available now.
Careful programming. I'm not denying that the C source code of Perl itself is well-written code.
Again, historical reasons. But we're even starting to see people moving from Perl and PHP to Ruby on Rails. (e.g. cdbaby.com)
BASIC and C. BASIC is in everything from single-chip microcontrollers to groupware systems and web browsers; C is available on practically every hardware platform known to man, even in cut-down form for LEGO.
Same reason Perl felt it necessary to *copy* regular expressions from awk. They're damn useful.
Secondly, because the PCRE package provides a good, fast, free, open source implementation, written by someone who actually knows how to write good secure code. So rather than reinvent that unpleasant wheel, lots of projects just use PCRE as their regex engine, and 'accidentally' get Perl 5 regex features.
But for what it's worth, Ruby doesn't have all the Perl regex functionality exposed, and provides a nicer object-oriented API for match results.
And I don't see anyone rushing to implement all the new syntax of Perl 6 regexes.
Same here. Try Ruby.
Not me. I migrated (to Ruby) after years of using Perl because Perl's syntax is so horrible and complicated that I never managed to learn a lot of the important features I knew Perl had--like the ability to do object-oriented programming.
Ruby has much simpler syntax and scoping. That means it gets out of the way and lets me write code. I know that everything I write could be done in Perl, and I don't care.
I also know that Perl has things Ruby lacks. But they're things I don't need that just make the language uglier and more complicated. I don't need three or four different ways to pass parameters to a function. There's a point at which "There's more than one way to do it" becomes pathological and bad for the language. It became clear from Larry's writings that Perl 6 was going to have even more syntactic complexity, so I decided it was time to leave.