Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem
Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem
- Subject: Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem
- From: Peter Duniho <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 19 May 2008 04:11:01 -0700
On May 19, 2008, at 3:26 AM, Jean-Daniel Dupas wrote:
That'd be great for the Mac, but not so great for the Cocoa
evangelists. It's hard to understand the neglect Java has seen on
the Mac, except as a way to try to steer more people towards Cocoa.
Cocoa is a framework, Java a language. Apple provided a Cocoa/Java
bridge to let developpers choose there prefered language to use
Cocoa, and bet what, almost nobody choose Java. That's why the
bridge is no collapsing slowly.
Java is not just a language. It's a framework too. As for the Cocoa/
Java bridge, I had no idea it existed. If I'd known, I would have
tried it.
I presume from your comment about "now collapsing slowly" that it's
no longer a fully-supported technology.
That said, as I've said repeatedly now, while I have my complaints
about Objective-C, that's not really what keeps Cocoa programming
from being fun for me.
It's different because there no informal protocol in C#, so you
have to create a interface for each optional method you want to add
to your object, and then declare that you implement each interfaces
in your class declaration.
Optional methods rarely appear in isolation. They represent some
behavior shared by a variety of objects, and most frequently as part
of a whole package.
But even so, what's so bad about having to declare an interface? In
Obj-C, I wouldn't hard-code a string in my code anyway; at a minimum,
I'd declare a constant that represents that string, and it's possible
in some cases I'd even initialize a selector variable to store the
actual selector. So it's not clear that you'd save that much typing,
if any. I surely wouldn't.
And using a formal interface provides compile-time code verification
that just isn't possible with the message-dispatching scheme.
I just don't see how declaring an interface and then using it is so
inferior to an informal protocol that it justifies the entire message-
dispatching paradigm, especially given that there are in fact
advantages to the former. At best, it's a wash.
(Besides, both Java and C# support via reflection functionlity that
that would allow this exact kind of informal protocol/interface
approach, were it truly necessary and significantly better).
I'm sorry, but this particular example is just plain weak. I'm
looking for a _compelling_ justification for the message-dispatching
paradigm, not an example that saves you a line or two of code every
now and then.
Pete
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