Re: Objective-C Question
Re: Objective-C Question
- Subject: Re: Objective-C Question
- From: The Amazing Llama <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 13:06:12 -0700
On Monday, September 22, 2003, at 11:25 AM, Steve Ehrenfried wrote:
All I can is UNBELIEVABLE! I asked some simple questions, not even
meaning it as a slam against the language and stating that I don't yet
know everything about Obj C, and I get attacked. There's an awful lot
of narrow mindedness, condescension and arrogance on this list...
You'll have to excuse us; some of us have been doing this defense
schtick for a while.
But you have to look at it from the other point of view, as well. Java
is not the be-all and end-all of OOP. C++ certainly isn't. A lot of
people use these languages, but I have heard very few people say they
actually enjoy working with them. You hear this about ObjC all the time.
The real issue here is that you basically came in and asked why ObjC
wasn't Java. You asked your question in more words than that, but what
it boiled down to was the same. The answers you got were pretty much
uniform: because it's not supposed to be Java and we're glad its not,
thankyouverymuch. Java, if you didn't know, was a way for Sun to keep
Gosling from going to work on ObjC at NeXT. He took a lot of ideas from
ObjC, strapped on a lot of ideas from C++ which ObjC and its developers
were pretty diametrically opposed to, and released it. This didn't sit
so well with some of the ObjC folks, as you might imagine.
I'm not saying that Java is a bad language. It's great for some things.
It has real enterprise sway, and real portability, and it's great for
that stuff. But don't think that it's the best stuff and that everyone
should emulate it, because a lot of its "features" are in fact viewed
as limitations when you're looking at them from the ObjC standpoint,
where the ability to make smart decisions at runtime and act upon them
is the holy grail. Any impediment of that-- from method privileges to
namespaces to final methods--is viewed as an impediment to developer
freedom, which it is, to a certain degree. The question really lies (as
it so often does in computing and much else in the world) in where you
want to draw the line between power and freedom.
Seth A. Roby The Amazing Llama < mail or AIM me at tallama at mac dot
com>
"Life is like an exploded clown. It's really funny until you figure out
what just happened."
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