Ask HN: What do you think of Objective-C?

Objective-C, the language: it's a nice, thin object-oriented layer on top of vanilla C.

It's super-easy to use to make object-oriented wrappers around vanilla-C libraries, compared to C++, and b/c Objective-C is conceptually simpler than C++ there's fewer ways to shoot yourself in the foot.

There's not much point using it for new development unless your project is very self-contained or you're targeting Mac OS X or the iphone; moreover, Apple's pushed out Objective-C 2.0 recently, and are in the driver's seat for the language's future.

Personally, I prefer Java for the kinds of products Objective-C is supposed to be used for (desktop/mobile software). The tradeoffs:

- objective-c is lighter-weight and very simple to code in; Java is a lot clunkier and tedious to write; winner: obj-c

- java has a huge set of support infrastructure and tooling; obj-c has xcode (which is ok, but not great); winner: java

- java has generics that're mostly type-safe; obj-c doesn't really have any equivalent. I like type-safety when I can get it, so winner is java.

If you're learning objective-c to do Cocoa or UIKit development, you will spend much more time learning your way around Cocoa and/or UIKit than learning Objective-C; objective-c is like a week at the absolute longest, but Cocoa takes months to learn.

The first commandment of Cocoa: always respect convention; there's lots of semi-documented conventions (in terms of naming methods and arguments and ivars and so forth), and you should follow any conventions you see unless you understand what you give up by not following that particular convention.

There are two golden rules for Cocoa:

rule 1: if you're coding up something that seems like something any realistic application would have to include, you should take another look @ the docs b/c apple probably gave it to you already.

rule 2: a lot of functionality you'd expect to be in utility classes is buried in base classes (like NSObject, NSArray, NSDate, etc.).

I really like Objective-C. I had been using mostly Ruby before I started Obj-C (to make a quick iPhone app), and I liked it so much that I ended up going even further and doing about half of my programming in C++. Obj-C was a nice introduction to using a compiled language in real code that did stuff (as opposed to CS homework, which was my only previous C experience). When I wanted to make real stuff (servers), though, Obj-C wouldn't work since it had few libraries and relied heavily (in practice) on Apple's implementation of NS* classes.

If you have programming experience, you should be able to learn 99% of Objective-C in about 5 hours.

Objective-C + Cocoa is the most productive GUI application development kit I have ever used.

If you are put off by the syntax, then you are placing a lot of meaning in the arbitrary weight of your existing habits.

In some ways it's a giant step backwards... you have to deal with pointers and header files. And it repeats itself a lot (declare the same things multiple times). String manipulation is awful in Objective C.

I would say it's a hell of a lot better than C. But kind of irritating compared to Java or Ruby.

I like how thin the Objective-C layer is above C. All of the language constructs are accessible through pure C method calls, which provide a lot of insight into how the system works.

Any time I sit and think about how something is done in Objective-C, it doesn't take long to work out how I'd implement it and C and most of the time I can be pretty close (or quickly find), how various bits of "magic" are accomplished.

I don't like the overloaded dot operator added in 2.0, and have yet to hear a good reason for its inclusion (attracting developers used to using dots is not a good reason, imho; reducing the number of nested braces is better, but still unnecessary). I could do without garbage collection. Reference counting really isn't that hard.

The other features (namely properties and fast enumeration) are nice additions to the language.

(edit: multiple ideas, one poorly written sentence)

I've been using obj-c for around a year now, and it's growin' on me :)

I didn't like it too much at first (funky syntax, different naming conventions, generally crappy string manipulation), but once I started using it, especially in conjunction with cocoa and ib, I really started liking it.

It has some cool perks, like using '+' (I forget the technical term) to add functionality to an existing class (i.e. adding a method to the NSString class by creating an NSString+Additions.m file, and all classes in your project can call that method on any NSString object). Much easier than having to create an NSString subclass just to add one method, and then having to remember to name all your NSString's something like MyString* str;

I also like that I can just throw a chunk of c or c++ code in there, and call it as a method. Kinda like having native JNI (department of redundancy department). Alright that was a really bad analogy...

Xcode is a decent SDK as well.

I enjoy it, it's my compiled language of choice. Easier to work with than plain C coming from a dynamic language background.

Personally, I think Objective C is a horrid and butcherous hack that really ought to have died when C++ was standardised. Trying to make C in to some kind of bastard and retarded cousin of smalltalk was never a good idea.

On the iPhone there are two main problems. First is lack of garbage collection. Not everyone can keep track of their allocations easily and the result if unstable programs for the end users. While there is some notion of allocatin pool it has problems - for once it's scoped to call stack, thus making it little more than extension of on-stack variables. Further, some standard methods that create e.g. strings add-ref strings for you, but some don't. Ther eis no consistency. It shouldn't have been that way.

The second problem is that cocoa touch is very async. By contrast windows forms is very synchronized - when you create a form and pass control to it, control does not return until that form closes, and then result is returned. Even a cavement can understand that. In cocoa/touch you pass control to a form, and then it returns and then you have to return it as well before the form is drawn. If you do something like closing a form in the event where you are supposed to re-draw the form the system blows up on you. If you set background from one callback it goes into infinite requirsion. There is no way to tell upfront - you have to try. It's very unintuitive that way and hard to wrap your head around it.

I'm sure a bunch of c00l haxors will tell you that they have no problem using it and therefore nobody else should have problems, but hey - some people can ride unicile, doesn't make it a good transporation choice.

I'm not very familiar with the language yet, but my first impressions have been favorable. Programming for the iPhone has been a breeze. Also, I really like that you can use C/C++ with it. (Not just exported functions; you can interact with a C++ object directly from within a .m file, for example.)

I like it, very easy to get into. Obj-C and Cocoa are a killer combination. Definitely get Aaron Hillegass' "Cocoa for Programming for Mac OS X" now in 3rd edition.

Objective-C is great - but Cocoa makes it even better. :)

I have summarized my (negative) thoughts here: http://blog.blinker.net/2008/11/11/impressions-from-the-ipho...

I haven't really used it, though, it is just the impression I took away from glancing at the tutorials and listening to the beginnings of the iPhone tech talk.

Behind Lisp, Obj-C/Cocoa is the most fun I have had programming.

Does anyone use Objective C for anything but the iphone?

I played with it some about 10 years ago, but at that time it was really in the wilderness and didn't have much practical application, so I let it be. It seems nice in some ways, but I don't really see it making the jump out of MacOS X territory. Who knows, though.

objective c is fine, its cocoa i find daunting. i am used to object.method() syntax so the [object message] syntax was a little hard to parse at first.... but you get used to it.

i went from writing a lot of python to writing obj-c so the transition to a strongly typed, compiled-and-linked language was a bit frustrating. not surprisingly its not as fluid a language as python..... but you get used to it