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Comment by setpatchaddress | Hacker News Reader

> In my experience people complain about Obj-C syntax when what they actually dislike are verbose Cocoa/Foundation/etc APIs

If so, that’s a real shame. Foundation may be the single best-designed standard library for a (non-functional) language ever.

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I agree, Foundation is a gem! The method naming is one of the assets - the names are clear, regular, and usually fairly obvious. The downside to that regularity and clarity is that the names are long.

One CoreFoundation example at random:

    CFURLRef CFURLCreateCopyDeletingLastPathComponent(CFAllocatorRef allocator, CFURLRef ref);

I think nearly everyone who reads that prototype will immediately understand what it does, but there's no denying it's a mouthful.

Tack on some unfamilar square-brackets and intersperse argument names, and it's understandable that people will conflate the syntax with the APIs.

CoreFoundation is not written in ObjC, it's C only (although toll-free bridged).

For me Foundation lacks composability. This method should be really two: CreateCopy (I assume it already exist) and mutating DeleteLastPathComponent.

I don't mention immutable by default behavior because it was long ago and written in C.

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