RE: Learning Cocoa (OT!: Small Language Rant)
RE: Learning Cocoa (OT!: Small Language Rant)
- Subject: RE: Learning Cocoa (OT!: Small Language Rant)
- From: Jeff Medcalf <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 16:41:35 -0500
At 6:47 +1000 7/17/01, Mark Orchard wrote:
Hmmm, not that easy. One of the major reasons why people left other
languages to develop with Java is the reasonably efficient garbage
collection system. Many a nightmarish debugging session happened when a
coder was trying to find a subtle memory leak caused by unbalanced resource
allocation/deallocation. It would be a big ask for Java programmers to leave
that behind and start messing with how and when to "release/retain".
I haven't really had any problem with release/retain/autorelease.
Sure, it is nice to have automated garbage collection like Java does
it, but it's also pretty easy to write a test harness around an OO
class to determine if it leaks or not.
No offence but I don't care how easy it is to learn, I don't want to learn
ANOTHER damn language! My "personal language cache" is full!
It's hard enough just to be proficient in Java/C++.
Then don't learn it. Java is supported and that support will get
better, not worse, as time goes on. Besides, programming is a
thought process, not a syntax. Once you have the thought process
fully down, expressing it idiomatically in whatever language you care
to use becomes pretty easy. Since Java and Obj-C are both OO
languages, the thought process is the same. (It's different, of
course, between procedural and OO languages).
The language Foundation/AppKit are written for does matter. The old die-hard
Mac developers will happily take ObjC in their stride and move on. But Apple
won't progress and OSX won't be a success with just the same group of loyal
developers. They'll need a whole lot of new developers to write for OSX and
a large proportion of them will want to do it in Java or C++. ObjC won't
have this wide-spread appeal for future OSX developers.
Do you mean the old die-hard NeXT developers? MacOS prior to X did
not use Obj-C in the API at all, AFAIK. Part of the reason for
sticking with Obj-C had to be the reduction in barrier to entry for
new programmers. Obj-C is just easier to learn and use than Java, by
a huge stretch at that, which makes it possible for people who don't
want to take the time to learn C, Java or (gods forbid) C++ to
develop quality application software. And once there are C++
language bridges for the APIs, then I do not see any reason why a
developer who chooses to use C++ would not, simply because Obj-C is
the language underlying the API. Same with Java, of course, except
that it's already supported.
-jeff
--
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| Jeff Medcalf )O( | email@hidden | www.caerdroia.org/~medcalf |
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| God bless those Pagans. - Homer Simpson |
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