Objective C - "horrendously, absolutely awful"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/sep/16/ios-android-windows8-programming-choose?commentpage=2#start-of-comments

by brettm • 15 years ago

5 5 15 years ago

guardian.co.uk

aaronbrethorst2• 15 years ago

I see you're new here. Thanks for submitting this, as it certainly is a discussion-provoking piece (albeit a bit trollish). That said, please make sure you that you don't link to the comments anchor, unless your intention is for HN folk to read the article's comments. Given that the quote cited in your title comes from the body of the article, I'm guessing this is not the case.

queensnake• 15 years ago

Also, the title is /way/ twisted from the intent of the article; you'd think it was some blogger's 2 paragraph pique. Instead, it's:

> iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows 8? A coder's guide

and has useful (or trying to be) programming career advice.

I just resubmitted it in its canonical form, because it's a worthy article and it'd get missed by a lot of people on the title, and because I'm evil and trying to work with the OP would take too long.

brettm• 15 years ago

I am new and thanks, I now know what trolling means (I didn't mean it)! I posted this article because I believe it may put people off from developing with Objective C due to some misconceptions about the language i.e. no iOS Garbage Collection doesn't mean that Apple are two generations behind Java or .NET or because only 6.1% of developers use Objective C means its an awful language to use.

aaronbrethorst2• 15 years ago

By no means am I suggesting that you're trolling, just that the original article is a bit trollish. Don't let that dissuade you by any means, though :) Welcome to HN!

makecheck• 15 years ago

These kinds of baseless statements really bug me. Where to begin.

First, Objective-C is not a big language. For example, look up Pierre Chatelier's guide [1] that maps from C++ concepts to Objective-C; there isn't a heck of a lot to know. Objective-C really is a language that you could learn pretty well in a couple of weekends. It's silly to suggest that professional programmers couldn't possibly find the time to pick up this language just because they're already firmly entrenched in the world of other languages. I'm forced to wonder if the article's author has used Objective-C at all.

The article doesn't give a lot of specific gripes. The only stated "problem" with Objective-C is its lack of garbage collection on iOS. Well it is widely known that Objective-C's lack of garbage collection is a benefit to iOS, not a detriment, since iOS applications perform better. And Apple's new Automatic Reference Counting scheme (ARC) is a stroke of genius: it "gives back" to developers the simplified coding that garbage collection would have allowed, but without sacrificing performance the way garbage collection does. ARC even avoids other problems, e.g. how to deal with retention of data across framework boundaries.

As far as needing a Mac to do development, that is technically true (but only for iOS; you could learn Objective-C using something like GNUstep and GCC on Linux, say). A Mac mini is not exactly expensive and it works with existing monitors and keyboards. There are also a lot of people already using Macs as their laptops, even if they primarily run Windows or Linux on it.

[1] http://chachatelier.fr/programmation/fichiers/cpp-objc-en.pd...

Objective C - "horrendously, absolutely awful"

Related Stories