Re: Visualizing Cocoa
Re: Visualizing Cocoa
- Subject: Re: Visualizing Cocoa
- From: Brian Howard <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 19:46:00 -0400
Quick, somebody give that man a cigar. Or, better yet, a raise. Listen
up Apple: you should hire this guy, and fast. I will slog and slog as
needed, because the app I have in mind needs Quartz, but I resent the
hell out of having to learn a bunch of stuff I know will be worthless.
Besides, in the long run you will be much better off if you teach us
right, from the start. Too late for me, but think of the future; the
idea is to make Cocoa not only powerful, which it is, but also so
ACCESSIBLE that within a few years you OWN a big percentage of the new
kids on the block. And, if you tear down the barriers and flatten the
learning curve, they will be the smartest kids to boot.
On Saturday, June 9, 2001, at 05:38 PM, David Trevas wrote:
I agree that more graphic aids should be used in explaining Cocoa,
Objective-C and OO concepts.
I believe that programmers who have slogged through BASIC, Fortran, C
and C++ and other languages to arrive at this stage in history think
that new programmers should endure the same rites of passage they
suffered through.
The idea of sending newbies to learn C first should be a big waste of
time, but the few Objective-C resources out there all assume a
knowledge of C. While the new programmer learns about control
structures (if, while, for) and data types (double, int), they waste
time learning about structures and functions as separate entities. I
realize that NSRect's and NSRange's are structures, but the usage of
them can be covered much more briefly in an Objective-C book.
If someone takes an ObjC guru too literally, they will end up having to
unlearn most of what they just learned. The first program taught
centers around "printf("Hello, world!\n");" First, the Cocoa
programmer should not be using stdio.h functions, in general. Second,
beginning C texts show you how to write code from scratch while a Cocoa
programmer snaps together existing objects, specializes an object that
is close to his desired one or, as a last resort, creates a new
subclass of NSObject.
It is very hard to go from learning the procedural (or structured)
programming paradigm to learning the object-oriented one. I believe
that there could be a book written that teaches OO programming with
ObjC and Cocoa to absolute beginners as their first language. It would
take some of the visual aids that behoward proposed to make the
concepts clear enough. I wouldn't be surprised if people starting in
ObjC first end up being better programmers than those of us who spent
many years learning the C, Fortran or old Basic way of programming.
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