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Comment by ricksta | Hacker News Reader

Objective C classes and methods are designed to be long and mostly typed by Xcode's autocomplete. With RubyMotion, I will end up typing out all those verbose methods, which I don't know if it's something I feel too big about.

The example author made here feels like I will end up typing about twice as much with RubyMotion than objective C.

Ruby: @window = UIWindow.alloc.initWithFrame(UIScreen.mainScreen.bounds) @window.makeKeyAndVisible

Objective C: self.window = [[UIWindow alloc] initWithFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]]; [self.window makeKeyAndVisible];

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I agree. With XCode's powerful autocomplete, I don't have to remember all the methods. In fact, you can guess the names a lot of the times due to their verbose and descriptive naming conventions, and XCode will help you along the way.

I'm a Rubyist, it's my primary language and I'd love to use it over Objective-c. But I'm also starting really like Obj-c, and right now it's the best thing out there for iOS because of XCode.

If you want to learn how to make iOS apps, learn Objective-c. Or at the very least learn it first. Trust me, you'll be glad you did.

The real benefit with Ruby is the creation of DSLs that make working with these UI elements much easier.

It's only a matter of time before someone creates a DSL that looks something like:

  window = screen.main.new_window(
    frame: true,
    key: true,
    visible: true
  )

Or something like that. I'm not an iOS developer, so I'm not really sure what parts of the insanely-verbose method calls are actually necessary.

(As an aside, I have Vim rigged up to do autocompletion with Ruby. I'm sure it would work with these Cocoa libraries as well)

I'm not an iOS developer, so I'm not really sure what parts of the insanely-verbose method calls are actually necessary.

It's called "Intention Revealing Names." Names are long to provide the programmer information, so shortening them would have a negative impact.

As an aside, I have Vim rigged up to do autocompletion with Ruby. I'm sure it would work with these Cocoa libraries as well

If someone writes the necessary plumbing.

Somebody already did once[1], though it's gotten a bit out-of-date. It needs to be manually revised every time a new SDK comes out, so it's going to keep falling out-of-date.

[1]: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2674

You need to keep in mind that you don't actually type out the entirety of XCode's methods. For instance:

self.window = [[UIWindow alloc] initWithFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]];

Was about 45 key presses in Xcode. And this is a fairly short method, take something like animating a view with a block and you're looking at way more typing to do it in Ruby Motion.

I wonder if IDEs like RubyMine will have a nice autocomplete for RubyMotion

I would look at the autocomplete scripts/library, see how the metadata is handled there, then see if the autocomplete data in XCode can be hooked up.

RubyMine doesn't support RubyMotion or the iOS SDKs now, but they're considering it (cf. http://devnet.jetbrains.net/message/5458781#5458781). You can vote up the feature here:

http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/RUBY-11039#tab=Comments

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