In praise of Objective C
slidetocode.com
slidetocode.com
That said, nothing he's really talking about has to do with the language itself (save, perhaps, for the performance characteristics closer to C++ than Java). He's more praising what C# developers always praise: he's basically describing it as "Java done better than Java."
I guess that isn't the entirety of Cocoa, but Objective-C and Foundation are very linked now.
Btw. since February there is GNUstep repository on github: https://github.com/gnustep (base = Foundation, gui = AppKit)
This isn't the case in Objective-C though.
@"foo" is an instance of the NSString class, which is a part of the Foundation library. However, it has its own special syntax. Now, Apple is adding @[] and @{}, which are NSArray and NSDictionary instances.
How so? Since, 99% of Objectice-C development includes Cocoa.
It's like arguing C++ and STL are separate. Might be true, but it's a rather pedantic distinction.
What sucks about Java is not the standard library but the line noise. I'm not sure that Obj-C improves much in this regard. Blocks are definitely an improvement over java but again, way too much line noise. Selectors are much better than the java reflection system, as well are categories.
If you compare Obj-C to C# there isn't really much to write home about. In C# it's a bit more difficult to use C but not much and it's tightly integrated enough into the OS that the GUI issues are largely non-existant. The MVVC system does leave something to be desired though, not really sure how much better xib is than xaml, as I tend to avoid both.
There are definitely a class of apps (games) that benefit from the tighter integration with C but in that case I'd look to managed C++ as a comparison, and not java.
I'd be interested to know what other things you consider warts - of the language, not the utilities. Apart from blocks (which seem to have a clear, concise syntax: certainly cleaner and more concise than lambdas in C++11.)
Yes, it's possible to work around all these issues but once you've worked around them you no longer have a very good development environment and are back to vim + make/xcodebuild. Lets not even get into the horrid bugs still present in clang (although arguably this is a defect in the compiler and not the language).
Blocks may be more concise than lambdas in C++ but they are even cleaner in C# and F#. I'd actually prefer a hybrid between the two where there was no return necessary for multistatement lambdas in C# and no fun keyword required in F#. Yes, I'm picky about what I like and dislike in languages.
The __block keyword is also fairly annoying.
The biggest warts for me are the impedance mismatches between various parts of the system.
Primitive types and NSObject mismatches
blocks, function pointers, and selectors (a selector should also be able to capture the object for which it is invoked), similar to how C# works out the differences between methods, delegates, and lambdas.
Also, the lack of generics, although I do appreciate essential lack of type system and ability to violate method signatures if one so chooses. At least in Obj-C the lack of generics conveys some ostensible benefit even if utilizing it is poor form.
Really? Because you can find tools that crash ever for 1 million/year...
If anything $99/year is on the very low side. I wouldn't expect anything to be bug-free at that price point. Have you tried any other large package, from Autocad to Creative Suite to SAP? Do they work 100% of the time?
4.3.1 does seem to be better.
So maybe Java is slow for UIs. But this general statement isn't true. Next time the author should fact check: https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#...
"one of the best IDEs around in Xcode" Ha. Ha ha.
Is that true? I'm not an Obj-C programmer, but I swear I remember Objective C being a part of most standard Linux distros well before OSX came out.
And it's true in the context of this post, because the author is conflating Objective-C and Cocoa throughout the entire post, so he's correct in saying that 'Objective-C [with Cocoa] is only available on Apple platforms'.
He also mentions GnuStep specifically in the post, and says that it's far from ready to use.
My main point is that, even if the quoted statement in the parent post to my original comment was technically false, the idea was essentially true. The biggest reason for using Objective-C at this point is for a type of project that can only be done on Apple's hardware and OS, not on Linux.
But let me give you a simple and plausible scenario where running Obj-C on Linux might be worthwhile.
Let's for argument's sake, say I'm an indie Windows developer who wants to do iOS development but has heard the most common complaint about Objective-C -- "the weird syntax".
Before I run out and blow my wad a Mac, I can set up a Linux VM with Obj-C to just play with the language at an abstract and academic level and see if I can even wrap my head around the language first.
If I were to trust the OP's sentence at face value, I wouldn't really know that was possible.
That is somewhat like saying that OS X being written in Objective-C somehow makes it possible/easier to write iPhone apps (which again, are not at all tied to the runtime or architecture of the host compiler's system).
See my comment above for GNUstep github repo.
Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach - this one covers an early version of Obj-C http://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Programming-An-Evoluti...
Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier - economics of software components - http://www.amazon.com/Superdistribution-Objects-Property-Ele...
Well, it's obvious that people think of (Apple) fanboism when they read such misinformation; apart from the fact that there's no point in writing such statements without citing some numbers or real cases.
I can tell you that I've written my last line of C++ exactly ten years ago. In these ten years I've designed and implemented a good deal of industrial software in different segments and never experienced performance problems. Already in 2004, which is ages ago, I designed and implemented a near real time system for distributing telemetry data in F1 racing - among others, Renault won two championships running that system. It was Java 1.4 and it worked pretty well. The specs were pretty demanding. I recall people wondering whether Java was up to the requisites (at the time it was a reasonable doubt, not today).
I am just lucky as I can mention a publicly known project, but there are tons of people around who daily experience excellent performance with Java and don't feel any desire to go back to C/C++. You'd just attend a couple of Java conferences (or at least read the slides) before publishing uninformed statements.
Objective-C saves you from making the choice between the high
performance C++ or the programmer-friendly Java by adding a
substantial runtime to a language that compiles to native code.
I know that ARC was recently added to Obj-C, but you can still accidentally harm yourself even with such simple tasks as adding items to array. If you need to deliver your app fast then sluggish (Java) is better than not working at all.
They've certainly gotten the look and feel right, because I didn't realize it was a Java application, but it is pretty sluggish, at least on my machine.
Yes, then they would have been unusable because of slow performance and regular gc pauses, like almost any Java program I ever met.
It's a lot faster now that it used to be around 2002+ with the Swing of the day, but still lags perceptibly behind C/C++ for UI work. And don't even think using it for a multimedia app (video/sound) etc, or a game, except if you delegate all the work to a hardware accelerated C/C++ 3D backend.
I don't think this is how it works, at least in the OS X market. I never seen any but 2-3 Java apps become popular, and none that much. All the popular, successful apps are native.
So, you can maybe deliver faster with Java (doubt it, since you'll have to implement all the Cocoa goodies and cool integration APIs by yourself) but it wont get you that far.
At least one of the built-in apps on early versions of Mac OS X (10.0/10.1?) was actually Java/Cocoa -- I want to say TextEdit, but I'm not certain. Soon after, of course, everything got ported to Objective-C.
Only up until Tiger. And you still had the "uncanny value" effect, despite the native-ish look and feel to Swing.
Plus, even SUN and then Oracle abandoned Java on the desktop.
Good luck with that. ;)
1) Whether Objective-C would have been "extinct" is quite subjective, but given that it is the power and force behind the mobile revolution which is happening on the iOS devices (iphone, ipad, etc) and all of the Macs out there. I would venture a guess that you're wrong about it being dated.
2) It has recently been updated... Objective-C 2.0 has features such as Garbage Collection and ARC to make memory management easy. If your conceptualization of a "modern" language is C++ or Java, please think again. "Modern" languages are moving towards flexibility and loose typing (like in Ruby, ObjC, etc...) not language such as C++ or Java.
James Gosling was, indeed, quoted once as citing ObjC as the inspiration for Java. Many NeXT engineers, in fact, helped to build Java when they went to Sun.
3) ObjC's use on other platforms is hardly zero, but it is, nonetheless not very popular on other platforms aside from Mac. But this is not, as you seem to suggest, because it isn't any good, but because many developers don't know that it's useful on other platforms because they think it's restricted to Mac.
So, if any of you would like to help make ObjC more useful, feel free to help the GNUstep project. We have much of Cocoa implemented. Help us make it more complete!!!
GC
Windows: C++
Linux: C
OS X: Objective-C