We Need to Replace Objective-C

http://ashfurrow.com/blog/we-need-to-replace-objective-c

by AshFurrow • 12 years ago

7 1 12 years ago

jawngee• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, this was posted so long ago (in internet time) that this comment will probably never be seen, but some things need to be said, so I'll say them here.

    Someday, someday soon, writing Objective-C as we know 
    it today will seem as antiquated as writing assembly. That's 
    going to hurt Apple.

I'm guessing the last time you wrote assembly was probably for some undergrad CS course and have no practical experience in what writing assembly is actually like. Otherwise, you'd not be making stupid assertions like this.

    Christ, look at how we're still arguing about dot-notation.

Who is arguing about dot notation?

    Incremental changes aren't the way to get to 
    the language of the future.

Don't tell that to the C++ committee. Incremental changes are in fact the way we get to the language of the future. New languages are incremental changes to old ones. Pascal -> ObjectPascal. C -> C++ -> Java -> C#. Ruby was incremental changes to a whole slew of languages.

    Well, look at Microsoft. They transitioned from Win32 
    APIs to .Net and the CLR VM and it took over a decade.

Microsoft still uses C++ for systems, which is what you are doing in Cocoa/iOS. .NET is mostly a wrapper of API's that are still C/C++ based. What parts of Windows do you think are written in .NET exactly?

    A new old thing is not really what we need. It seems 
    absurd that 30 years after the Mac we still build the 
    same applications the same ways.

30 years ago we were using C++ to write apps for the mac, Object Pascal before that. If you don't think Objective-C (and the NS* frameworks) isn't a huge improvement on that, then you probably have no idea what you are talking about.

    It shouldn't use pointers, structs, header files, anything C-based

Why? What are you so afraid of?

    It should be a memory-managed language 
    (No ARC, not retain/release, no Core Foundation)

Again, why? You know they did have a GC'd version of Objective-C, but it was such a pile of shit that they dumped it for ARC.

    It should have native, unicode strings and native collections

I've no idea what you mean by this. Native? Built-in collection types? Why are you so intent on robbing yourself of tools?

    It should be concise

Concise compared to what? I can't think of any other systems level language that is nearly as concise as Objective-C.

    It should have named parameters

Yeah, because method signatures aren't concise enough. /sarcasm

My biggest question is why you aren't using RubyMotion, Ximian or HTML/Javascript to build apps for either platform? Objective-C is not the only way.

With Apple re-writing more and more of the OS in Objective-C (Finder in Mavericks, for example) my guess is your wish won't be coming true anytime soon. Will we be using it in 20 years? Will Apple exist in 20 years? Who knows.

We Need to Replace Objective-C

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