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Comment by barumrho | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, the code translates to Objective-c almost one-to-one. I don't think it shows the potential of RubyMotion.

The thing is, when you create a table view in iOS apps, most of the work is for design and interaction like swiping to show a set of controls.

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This is RubyMotion's biggest problem right now. All of the examples are nearly 1:1 of ObjC code, and they require you to already know the iOS SDK. For someone who already knows Ruby and iOS programming, it might save a few keystrokes here or there.

This specific example saves some code over building the app from scratch in straight ObjC. But, you could get the same savings with a regular ObjC library that does the same thing, too.

It's debatable that it even saves keystrokes. Xcode's autocompletion is very good, assuming it's actually working at the time.

That's not necessarily a bad thing: if you're like me (seasoned Objective-C developer, and only the briefest exposure to Ruby) it's quite informative.

A lot of talk about RubyMotion has been about how Ruby developers and those who aren't familiar or comfortable with Objective-C can develop for iOS. I don't see why it can't work in the other direction as well: a nice entry point for people familiar with Objective-C looking for an easy-in for Ruby.

Sure, that could be a pro of RubyMotion, but then that's not the goal.

I develop in Objective-C as well, and I am very interested in what RubyMotion will bring to the table. So far, what I've seen is typical Objective-C code translated to Ruby. That doesn't offer me any advantage. What I want to see is something that will significantly boost productivity. REPL seems like one of them, but I want to see something on the code level.

Unfortunately, it seems like those who aren't familiar or comfortable with iOS and Objective-C will still be completely lost with RubyMotion.

I don't think diving into RubyMotion without knowing iOS API is that overwhelming; my only first hand experience with Objective-C was when I tried to submit a very small patch (2 lines) to open source project, yet I still found RubyMotion to be very easy to work with.

There are few things I wish it was simpler (e.g. Core Data) but I guess this will be fixed over time with RubyMotion wrappers and some kind of DSL.

I'd love for iOS UI interactions to have less ceremony around them in general. This is a step in that direction. :)

But you're right, there's a lot of work to do to support the concerns in a real app. I'm looking forward to it.

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