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Comment by eblume | Hacker News Reader

This sounds neat, but I want to ask others here as I am not (yet) a Cocoa developer - is all Cocoa code this ugly? In these short examples I honestly can't fathom what is happening due to the syntactic 'oddities'. Maybe my C-variant-fu is not as strong as it should be.

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This sounds neat, but I want to ask others here as I am not (yet) a Cocoa developer - is all Cocoa code this ugly?

I am a Cocoa developer, and I have to say that the presentation of this idea on the blog leaves something to be desired. It seems to be oriented towards people already familiar with Reactive Programming and FP, but it doesn't set up that expectation at all. At the same time, it's very confusing and a little unintentionally off-putting for devs who aren't familiar with those notions, even for those who already know Objective-C and KVO.

It still might be a good idea, though.

That was my fear while I was writing the post :\

The problem with Rx / RAC is there's a big learning curve, especially coming from procedural programming. It's much bigger than 1 blog post can cover. My hope at least is that it will drive at least some people to dive deeper.

Objective C is smalltalk on top of C. It looks extremely bad when you stick it in the super skinny columnar formats of many blogs.

At 80-300 characters per line it's fine and very readable.

So Objective C programmers can't print code to read it? :-(

What? The blog is displaying the text narrower than it shows up in a source file. This makes it uglier than it is in actual practice e.g.

What

? The

blog is displaying

the text narrow-

er than it shows up in

a source file

. This

makes it

uglier than it is in

actual prac-

tice

I got the point, sorry if I was unclear.

My point was, it is hard to print 300 chars wide code. Ideal code width for printing is < 80 chars...

Why would you print code in this day and age?

I don't print code, but when I do, it's in landscape mode and wider than 80 characters. But hey, I do this for all languages.

I'm pretty sure I've never printed ObjC

Heh, welcome to the learning curve :)

Yeah, it can be ugly, but once you know what's going on it all reads pretty quickly.

It's not so bad if you give it space to spread out a little. The wrapping in the column makes it much more difficult to follow, especially when used with Xcode's unusual indent style.

Eh. You get used to it, then it looks normal. I guess it's the same 'wtf' when beginners see a bunch of meaningless code.

It appears to be personal, but for many the answer is yes... that's why RubyMotion is a big deal.

RubyMotions looks even uglier for me. It's just like someone stripped all the beauty of Ruby with libraries that weren't meant to pair with it.

The Objective-C syntax doesn't look strange to me, yet its verbosity make the whole picture more difficult to grasp than in Ruby in my opinion. It's somehow like difference between a document and a bullet point reppresentation of it.

However, I haven't made my mind yet about RubyMotion. There are some propositions for it and some against and a lot has to come in the next weeks. Let's see what will happen.

Note: I have been coding in Objective-C for two years and in Ruby for 1-2 months.

I guess the blocks-in-blocks code can get quite unreadable at times. Personally I like to store blocks in variables in such situations and add the variable to a function that required the block parameter. Makes code so much more readable when blocks are nested.

Yeah, we played around with a bunch of different styles, including defining the block before its use. It looked cleaner but the code locality of defining them inline won.

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