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Comment by boucher | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but feel you did not read this post. Simply saying Obj-J is a "leaky abstraction" is meaningless, and yet you offer no examples of how the abstraction leaks (or why its actually problematic).

On top of that, you seem dedicated to the argument that Objective-C is a bad language, and that Objective-J is silly for wanting to re-implement it. Of course, as mentioned in the post, that was in no way the goal of Objective-J. The actual language isn't the point.

Separately, Objective-C is a great language, and plenty of people love it. More every day thanks to the iPhone. Can you give me three reasons why you don't like it?

Finally, claiming OO programming is dead is nonsensical. Java is by far the world's most popular programming language. Right below it you'll find C++ and C#. Three strictly OO languages. Not to mention the fact that two of the three most popular JavaScript libraries build in classical inheritance.

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Separately, Objective-C is a great language, and plenty of people love it

so much so that its almost impossible to find it being put to use outside of places apple forces it. and before you say "gnustep"...no one uses that

Can you give me three reasons why you don't like it?

1. goofy/eyes-bleed syntax

2. i don't care about OO

3. i'll think of something later

Finally, claiming OO programming is dead is nonsensical. Java is by far the world's most popular programming language.

java is a ployglot language. they're busy now trying to turn it into a hybrid-functional language...just like c#, the other kitchen-sink language

and c++ was designed from the ground-up to be multi-paradigm, this is all over everything stroustrup says about it

"1. goofy/eyes-bleed syntax"

This is almost always an indication that a programming language critic has nothing really thoughtful to say. Same with Lisp and S-expressions.

If I may paraphrase: "It's slightly different than what I'm used to, therefor I despise it."

I agree, the middle part is weak, but the bookends are compelling arguments.

You mean:

"impossible to find it being put to use outside of places apple forces it."

That's a huge caveat. iPhone development is extremely popular. Maybe the point is that people just put up with Objective C in order to do iPhone/Mac development. But I don't think that is true. NextStep had a small but rabidly devoted following, and part of that was because they really liked Objective C. Apple tried Java bindings to Cocoa at one point, but found everyone used Objective C anyways.

In general, I think it's true that most developers don't know much about ObjC until they want to develop for iPhone/Mac. But once they learn it, they tend to like it, from what I can tell.

Apple tried Java bindings to Cocoa at one point

oh come on, it is well known that apple intentionally dragged their feet on their java support for years

probably because they realized that as gross as java was, very few people would bother with objective c if they could get first-class support for java on cocoa

> oh come on, it is well known that apple intentionally dragged their feet on their java support for years

Apple (or more, exactly, the part from NeXT) did initially bet a lot on Java adoption. They ported the entire WebObjects stack from ObjC to Java, only to watch the technology get abandoned by those in the banking and eCommerce communities. The conversion was so total that when the Cocoa-To-Java bridge in OS X was deprecated, it was no longer possible to continue using the original WO tool chain. (What WO development outside of Apple exists made a new chain based on Eclipse, from what I read.)

No, if they "dragged their feet" it was simply because Java's static OO-ness doesn't map well to Objective-C's fully dynamic nature. Objective-C is basically just Smalltalk semantics (minus control structures) bolted on to C.

It works surprisingly well, but you can't and won't believe it until you try it yourself.

That's inconsistent with how quickly Apple had Carbon ready using C. Just a matter of effort.

Carbon is a port of C APIs from the classic mac mostly. On top of that, Objective-C is ultimately C, and its easier to talk between the two than Java.

This is almost always an indication that a programming language critic has nothing really thoughtful to say. Same with Lisp and S-expressions.

i didn't mention lisp or s-expressions. of course taste is subjective, but the "objective c is fugly" meme has lots of adherents

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