Re: Why Objective-C over Java?
Re: Why Objective-C over Java?
- Subject: Re: Why Objective-C over Java?
- From: Deirdre Saoirse Moen <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 12:01:12 -0700
I am a new to OS-X programming and I don't have experience with Objective-C.
I understand that Objective-C is seemingly not hard to learn, but I
want to stay with Java at this stage because of compatibility and
reuse issue. Thus it seems to be natural for me to stick to java
and jump into writing for OS-X with it.
You're certainly welcome to, however, as all the documentation is in
Objective-C, you should at least get a rudimentary understanding of
it.
However I'm curious how many people have been there, and how do you
think about Java in OS-X and PB/IB environment.
About what I usually think of Java: not much fun as a place to go,
great as something to drink, and a language I prefer not to program
in.
Would it be more productive to start with Objective-C? Isn't there
any major pitfall hidden? Most people in this list seems to be
working with Objective-C API. Does Apple recommend Objective-C over
Java? if so, what's the reasoning behind this?
1) The Java architecture means that Java apps launch a JVM, which
adds significantly to startup time and something non-zero to the run
time.
2) People tend to forget Fred Brooks' other law: the number of lines
of code a programmer produces is constant regardless of language.
Java is more verbose than ObjC (without being clearer) and, in cases
where one wouldn't have to subclass in ObjC, you'd have to in Java,
thus leading to more code to maintain and fail.
So if I am a manager leading a project, why would I want to spend
more money and time to develop a project that ran slower?
In the typical case, development times are short. Another rule of
software engineering is that the shorter the development schedule,
the more non-linear the amount of total expended person-hours. So, if
you have a language that adds n% more time, that becomes
exponentially more as the project development time gets shorter.
--
_Deirdre Stash-o-Matic:
http://weirdre.com http://deirdre.net
Macintosh Developer (seeking work): Will work for Cocoa
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