Help Put Objective-C Back in the Top 10 This Weekend | Hacker News Reader

Help Put Objective-C Back in the Top 10 This Weekend

objectivechackathon.appspot.com

29 pointsdanicgross17 comments

Hi, OP here.

The actual goal isn't to "beat" any other language - it's just a theme for the event.

Although proprietary, Objective C (and iOS) is a widely used platform. It also has a relatively small ecosystem. There aren't a lot of great libraries, and wheels frequently get re-invented. Our hope is to change that.

So, Linus Torvalds showed up in the list of people under the link that says "Join the list -->".

I highly doubt that he signed up for this event. I could be wrong, but if not - why the chicanery? Honesty is the best policy.

A proprietary language created for a closed, for-profit platform isn't naturally the most popular choice for open source projects.

Noob question: is a language proprietary if its only compiler is proprietary or if the main one is? There are open source compilers for Objective-C.

Considering that XCode uses a version of clang (which is open source) for it's compiling, I wouldn't say that the main compiler is proprietary either. I think that what people mean is that all of the "usefulness" of Objective-C comes from using it with OSX/iOS development, and all the stuff related to that is proprietary.

> Let's show the community that Objective-C developers care about open source.

by organizing an event only to boost statistics.

The blog post appears to be asking people to fork projects with the sole purpose to bump the stats on github. If it's not on the charts, there's a reason. If someone wants to fork a project, they need a goal other than promoting obj-c. Let's not turn github into a fork graveyard (like sourceforge has become.)

Do those stats include private repos or just open source?

I assume open source since other elements in that page refer to public repos (github.com/timeline), but I'm not certain.

I wonder, I wonder what kind of comments would appear with something like "Help put VB.NET back in the top 10 this weekend".

How does anyone suffer either way? Someone is trying to get more open source out which seems like a good thing for any language.

This is a bad idea. What's next, git bots? I'll assume from now on Objective-C ranking is being gamed.

Why would someone make that their goal?

This takes fanboyism to a whole new level.

Or it's just a hook for catching peoples' interest in participating in the group thing the hosts were organizing. (Yes, it'd be silly to devote your time to an effort like this to try to "help" Objective-C. But I don't expect anyone is really doing that.)

Edit: What the OP said.

It's a call to action, to get Objective-C coders more involved in open source. Obviously it's not to the detriment of other open source code.

The guy is a commercial obj-c developer, with one or more books on obj-c. It's in his personal interest to do so.

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