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Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

I am not criticizing. This is a perfectly neutral question:

Isn't the issue with a lot of these "look Ma, no Objective-C" approaches in that there are always little nagging issues here and there?

I mean, Apple is constantly moving Objective-C/Xcode/iOS (notice I didn't say "forward"). Isn't it somewhat dangerous to adopt peripheral approaches for development rather than staying (suffering?) with the Apple-provided tools?

Now, if someone has an alternative IDE that truly allows me to record Xcode to a DVD and perform a ritual burning ceremony of said DVD...that would be something.

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What you have to keep in mind is that RubyMotion is not "just another wrapper". It is actually implemented on top of the Obj-C runtime. So that means Apple would have to make breaking changes to the runtime (the thing documented here: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa...) in order to break RubyMotion.

I said this in another reply, but I'll reiterate here. It's not the lack of Objective-C that is the big deal here. Afterall you are still interfacing with cocoa, and are stuck with a lot of the verbosity in doing that.

The real key to this is the REPL and interactivity between coding and the running app. Being able to edit bits of functionality and structure in the running app, and immediately see the results is AWESOME!

I don't know Ruby. Therefore, by my own admission, this comes out of complete ignorance.

I am currently working on a project that uses a genetic solver and some fairly complex state machines driven by fairly involved databases. I can't possibly see how something like this could be made to be interactive in terms of the development process. Generally speaking you are writing a lot of code before you get to compile and see the results. And, personally, I don't have any issues with the compilation process.

What do you mean by "interactive"?

Your application is something that doesn't lend itself to the problem that this solves. With UI related things, it is often very helpful to be able to tweak UI elements while the program runs, instead of the tweak, compile, run cyle.

http://vimeo.com/36579366

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