Comment by subwindow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by subwindow | Hacker News Reader

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Somebody already did once[1], though it's gotten a bit out-of-date. It needs to be manually revised every time a new SDK comes out, so it's going to keep falling out-of-date.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

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