Re: Learning Objective-C
Re: Learning Objective-C
- Subject: Re: Learning Objective-C
- From: John Hörnkvist <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 20:24:11 +0200
On Tuesday, June 12, 2001, at 05:07 PM, Michael Grant wrote:
I'd appreciate any comments on the return-on-investment of learning
Smalltalk before Objective-C. Will Smalltalk make ObjC easier by enough
to make up for the initial investment of time in learning it? At this
point I have a basic grounding but very little experience in C and no
OO background to speak of.
I think that the main advantages of using something like Smalltalk are
that it makes it much harder to "cheat" and do procedural programming,
and that there are interpreted environments for it.
Learning a pure OO (SmallTalk), a pure functional (Haskell), a pure
logical (Mercury) and a pure procedural language (and assembler) will
help you build your "bag of tricks" much faster than using a combined
language like Objective-C, because it forces you to learn new design
approaches.
To my mind, interpreters and debuggers are often undervalued as learning
aids; I remember learning a fair bit from stopping the Basic interpreter
on a Commodore 64 (back in 1984, or so) to find out what a program was
doing. For a compiled language, you can get similar results by using a
good debugger.
Still, I'd suggest starting with Objective-C and the sample code
provided by Apple. Take the simplest example, look at the code -- but
don't spend much time doing that -- add break points to the methods and
run the program in the debugger. That way you can see exactly what gets
called when. Make small modifications and see how they affect the
program. When you think that you understand how a program works, move on
to the next example.
Start small. Don't make ambitious goals for the functionality of your
programs.
(The downside of this approach is that it will take a fair amount of
time, and unless you're extremely talented, or already have formal
training, you'll miss a lot of concepts that you would learn from formal
training.)
Regards,
John Hornkvist
--
ToastedMarshmallow, the perfect Cocoa companion
http://www.toastedmarshmallow.com