Re: Visualizing Cocoa
Re: Visualizing Cocoa
- Subject: Re: Visualizing Cocoa
- From: email@hidden
- Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 09:50:46 -0700
>
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.
This is one of the more inane posts I've seen on this list - and that's
saying something. You can't expect to deal with a complex programming
environment unless you understand -- and understand well -- the simpler
components from which it's built. You also need to know its history to
fully grasp it.
The jump from Procedural to OO programming is not really the difficulty,
because Proceduarl programming is fairly easy, conceptually. What you are
learning when you learn procedural languages is the basic syntax and
micro-level concepts that are necessary to all programming. Once you get
inside a method of a class, you'll see most of the "straight" C kind of
stuff.
Plus, especially in Obj-C, unlike Java, you still have all the procedural
tools to use, like structs and typedefs, etc., and you need to know these
because they are heavily used in the CoreFoundation material.
Don't encourage people to run before they can crawl; they are certain to
get discouraged if they do.