Re: Beginner with Objective-C was Re: scanf...?
Re: Beginner with Objective-C was Re: scanf...?
- Subject: Re: Beginner with Objective-C was Re: scanf...?
- From: Paul Lynch <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 19:05:56 +0100
On 10 Apr 2006, at 16:27, Ondra Cada wrote:
On 10.4.2006, at 17:10, Erik Buck wrote:
I actually disagree with many who say it is not necessary to
thoroughly understand the C programming language before learning
Cocoa. However, we may all be talking at cross purposes, and we
may even be saying the same thing in different ways.
Most probably :)
I'll try to explain myself :)
(a) IMHO, for a start, just a passing knowledge of some important
features is sufficient
I'm with Ondra on this one. You don't need to be a complete expert
in all aspects of your environment before you can start; if you did,
then nothing would ever get started :-). Erik's viewpoint is a
purist, rather than entirely practical, one.
A long time ago, probably starting in 1992, I used to tell people on
my NeXT course (I based it on John Glover's University of Houston
one) that I could teach an experienced C programmer ObjC in ten
minutes - and sometimes I did. You can comfortably cover everything
that you see in far more than 90% of ObjC programs in that time. I
think I was probably the person that originated that claim, back on
comp.sys.next.programmer.
The catch in this claim is the mythical "experienced C programmer".
There is a lot of lore and background knowledge involved in reaching
that state, and I certainly couldn't teach those fundamentals in 10
minutes (and probably not in 10 hours). Conversely, a knowledgeable
object oriented programmer could pick up both the essentials of C and
ObjC in probably 20 minutes or less.
Being able to remember the details of every class in the Cocoa
universe also isn't at all important - having a rough idea of where
to look and being able to decode the documentation (including header
files) is what really matters.
But the most important factor of them all is being able to think in
objects. Even with an encyclopaediac understanding of ObjC, if you
don't naturally think in objects, your applications will be
disappointing. Reaching this understanding is a different process,
and it seems to require the elapsed time to absorb the usual
explanations of OO before your brain can deploy it; this is going to
be measured in months, or even years, not in minutes.
If you study the beginner questions asked most often here, and in the
webobjects-dev lists, the common factor is a lack of oversight; some
of those beginners are very experienced CodeWarrior/C++ developers,
not just complete newbies to programming. A lot of them I would
classify as "you can't get there from here" questions, and I see that
most of those either don't get answered, or get a RTFM response. You
have to grok it, you can't just quote from the manual.
Paul
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