Re: The ULTIMATE Cocoa Development Language
Re: The ULTIMATE Cocoa Development Language
- Subject: Re: The ULTIMATE Cocoa Development Language
- From: Rick <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 20:37:54 -0600
On Thursday, January 3, 2002, at 05:19 PM, Steve Schacht wrote:
IMHO, the ultimate Cocoa programming language/environment doesn't exist
yet.
Why? Because Cocoa deserves - no, it's SCREAMING for - a truly VISUAL
programming language. I'm not talking about just visual interface
design;
I'm talking about visual _programming_. I'm talking about a language
like,
well... Has anyone ever used Prograph (formerly known as Prograph
CPX) by
Pictorius (formerly known as Prograph International which started out
as TGS
Systems)?
Yep..I once owned both Prograph (v 2.5 I think) and then upgraded to
CPX. My problem with it mainly was that they never jumped on the
bandwagon quick enough to get the latest APIs integrated. Apple had
just released QuickTime 1.5 which is where I had quite an interest in.
Just couldn't tap into that API via Prograph.
Anyhow, while the visual nature of it was "cool", I think the current
system (i.e. Cocoa dev environment) is a fantastic foundation. We have
a UI designer as well as a code generator. That is a very decent start.
I think what would make this more powerful, useful, etc. is to layer
other features and/or extend existing ones. e.g. I'd love to see the
"collapseable code" feature where one can collapse/expand blocks of
code. Very useful for code inspections and learning what a complex
block of code does by first inspecting things at a higher level.
Rather than perhaps drawing Cocoa code visually, perhaps simply a tool
that could translate the code into diagrams? I'd like to potentially
see more of these types of tools. I'm not too keen on code generators
that supposedly translate your design docs...I guess I'm thinking more
of "reverse-engineering" types of tools.
One item I'm very happy with is Apple's HeaderDoc tool which now
supports Obj-C. It's nice to have a system that can document your code
in an automated fashion.
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Ricky A. Sharp Instant Interactive(tm)
Founder & President www.instantinteractive.com
mailto:email@hidden
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