Switching from scripting languages to Objective C and iPhone: useful libraries. Matt Biddulph collects together some very useful libraries for developers just getting started with Objective-C (though I’m not too keen on the title).
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iPhone and OS X development is still the giant road block to the tech industry average joe moving to Apple in droves and taking their followers with them.
Many already have Apples that go with their PCs but don't develop for them because it's too hard, too exclusive, and most importantly it's not more fun / easier than doing it for Windows.
Why would the guy who makes his bread by coding in c++ move to Objective-C (to keep in the Mac paradigm)? Move from one stinking hole to another? No thanks, the beast you know is better.
Now if Apple did some dramatic stuff to make it easier to tinker with writing mac style mac apps (ie not command line stuff) for the average low level programmer who is still agile they might reduce the over all level of quality in mac apps but there would be more of them.
Python has Cocoa bindings of course but it doesn't feel like Python
ECMA-262 is familiar to millions of people but ignored outside of browsers.
I say let em use the scripting languages and they can ease into writing performance oriented code in compiled languages once their feet are wet.
Dave K - 27th January 2009 19:50 - #
I fail to see how you can seriously compare C++ and Obj-C and end up declaring Obj-C sucks (let alone as much as C++).
C++ and Obj-C took completely different paths to objectifying C, C++ took the efficiency path yielding horrendous complexity, while Obj-C took the orthogonality path and a clean break between "objective" and "C" (a result of which being that you can also use Objective-C++). As a language, Obj-C is much, much cleaner than C++. It's basically a layer of Smalltalk (sans blocs and with optional static typing) layered over C.
Not even remotely close to the linguistic clusterfuck that C++ is.
Command-line stuff? For writing Obj-C apps? Is that a joke?
Masklinn - 27th January 2009 21:30 - #
Also, if you decide that you don't like Objective C, very nice bridges exist so you can program OS X applications in Python, Ruby or Java or whatever.
I don't know if these bridges works for the iPhone though...
They don't, given none of the runtimes is present on the iPhone (and I think the iPhone SDK forbid bundling an interpreter in your app). If you want to code for the iphone, you have no choice but to use (Objective-)C or (Objective-)C++.
Masklinn - 29th January 2009 12:17 - #
The restriction is apparently specific to shipping a runtime that can download and execute content. Gruber thinks it's fine if that runtime is just embedded inside an app:
phl - 29th January 2009 13:03 - #