Hacker News Reader

Comment by Emore | Hacker News Reader

I'm missing Objective-C. Fairly sure it should be top 20 considering the overall good quality -- and quantity -- of Mac apps.

View on HN

Objective-C (and Cocoa) is notoriously under-documented. Much of what you do in Mac software development is tribal knowledge, which honestly sucks.

Sites like CocoaDev try to maintain some semblance of a knowledge base, but it's still woefully inadequate.

Apple refuses to publish code snippets, and their API docs consist of little more than what you would learn from the header files.

Mac development is a pain in the ass, even though I like Objective-C as a language :)

I can't really say I agree with you. There are a lot of good books on the subject, there are a lot of great tutorial sites (free) on the web (look at scott stevenson's work, or cocoa is my girlfriend, or CocoaDev). The mailing lists are pretty heavily trafficked, as is the #macdev irc channel (if not always entirely helpful).

The API documentation is better than most development environments I've worked with. Admittedly, Apple's secrecy problem gets in the way of publicly acknowledging bugs, missing features, or planned upcoming features. These things can be frustrating. Apple publishes a large selection of sample code though. In fact, they ship a lot of it with the developer tools themselves (plus all the docs), so you don't always have to go looking through the website.

iPhone development is undeniably worse right now. I imagine this will change over time, but I agree their is a lot of work to be done on that front.

There's a Google group where people can make suggestions for additions to the site. Objective C is probably a sensible one to include, at this point, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com