Objective C is one of the primary implementation and API languages
for Mac OS X. Apple is not making any effort to provide both
procedural and object-oriented APIs for every new technology; that
would, quite simply, be a waste of time and money.
I for one don't think so. Having multiple API sets nurtured and
cared for is more characteristic of "the most advanced operating
system in the world". And let's not revisit the folly where at one
time Pascal was the one true king on the Mac and now it's being said
the same of Objective-C.
Personally, I find the Carbon implementation much more appealing. It
seems to me that the strength of Cocoa is in the class design, not
necessarily the Objective-C means. That type of design, as currently
reflected, adapted, and implemented in the CoreFoundation/Carbon
combo offers me a lot of flexibility. And I think it's foolish of
whoever is making the decisions at Apple not to put everything
possible into the lowest possible layers first so it becomes
available simultaneously in Carbon and Cocoa. I mean Apple's
currently got a fairly flush wallet from iPods, so why not pump some
back into multi-brain OS X?
What CoreFoundation is currently missing though, is integration with
the OSType concepts that dominate in components (i.e. OSA,
AppleEvents, QuickTime, Input methods, etc.) and CarbonEvents and a
partial lack of types (i.e. 100% coordination with XML Schema data-
types). A deft insertion of those facilities in CoreFoundation would
mean for instance an ease of AppleScript-ability for Carbon apps that
would easily match what is now available in Cocoa.
Part of what I find poor in Cocoa has been recently put by Finlay
Dobbie:
The issue Cocoa has is mostly to do with it being unfeasibly tricky
to extract things from the Obj-C runtime class hierarchy (classes
in the bundles would have to go away - what happens to instances?
what about categories, what do you do with those (since you no
longer have the original method implementations - you could cache
them and return them on unload, but then you could have weird
behaviour if you unloaded things in an order other than they were
loaded, etc...)
That is to say it doesn't have namespaces so it could unload a
namespace rather than the intertwined and convoluted mess Finaly
talks about.
And if Cocoa's so smart, how come it took 4+ years to get Cmd-Shift-E
(Enter Replace string) into PB/Xcode?
My 2ยข.
Philip Aker
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