Re: New Cocoa Programmer
Re: New Cocoa Programmer
- Subject: Re: New Cocoa Programmer
- From: Rainer Brockerhoff <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 17:35:44 -0200
Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 10:36:34 -0500
From: email@hidden
...
... What is the point of starting with C
when at least a third of it will never be used at all, and another third
will have to be unlearned?
Brian, while I sympathize with your frustration regarding
documentation and the whole learning process, I must disagree with
this sentence. I've been programming in C since 1985, and I can
confidently say that for any sizeable Mac OS X application - either
in Cocoa/Objective-C or in Carbon - you _will_ need to know at least
95% of C, and won't have to "unlearn" anything whatsoever about C,
either.
Look, I bought into this program because Apple, in "Object Oriented
Programming and the Objective-C Language," sold me on the idea of getting
more bang for every line of code I might write: not having to reinvent the
wheel quite so often, modularity, reusable code, HIGHER LEVEL OF
ABSTRACTION, and other sales pitches.
Personally I believe that the whole OOP/ObjC/Cocoa sales pitch was
wrong in that it created a whole bunch of fanatical newbie converts
which now believe that this is the One Single True Way of programming
and that they'd never have to define a C procedure or structure,
dereference a pointer, call a Carbon or BSD routine, and so forth,
ever again - nor even need to learn about these things.
OK, I exaggerate a little here - but the whole "higher level of
abstraction" thing is relative. You have to go down to earth and
twiddle bits sometimes. Mac OS X is a layered, complex OS. Cocoa as a
framework is not, and will not be for years (if ever) a 100%
sufficient to do something like the Finder with just "if" statements
and message sending.
--
Rainer Brockerhoff <email@hidden>
Belo Horizonte, Brazil
"Originality is the art of concealing your sources."
http://www.brockerhoff.net/ (updated Oct. 2001)