try doing anything really advanced in iPhone, and you wish you new C really well. Sure, Object C has some facilities, but when I wanted to do sockets, low level C /BSD sockets were the best. Ditto for pthreading, and a host of other facilities that come from the BSD undepining of OS X.
You can mix C and Object C pretty well, even in the same source files, while if you want to use C++, I think you have to give up using Object C.
People coming from dynamic languages will be at a great disadvantage, since they are used to all the facilities that come from using these languages.
I really think that iPhone app development, is the kind of development that separates boys, from real developers. Anybody get a PHP web app, or a Ror page going on in a couple of weekends, not so with mobile client development. It takes a lot of patience to get where you want.
Re:Get good at iPhone app development
by tlrobinson on Wednesday August 20, 2008 @04:23PM
(#281986)
Minor correction (a pet peeve of mine): it's Objective-C, not Object C.
You can actually mix C++ and Objective-C. I would only recommend that if you have some existing library or something that you must use in an Objective-C application.
> I really think that iPhone app development, is the kind of development that separates boys, from real developers. Anybody get a PHP web app, or a Ror page going on in a couple of weekends, not so with mobile client development. It takes a lot of patience to get where you want.
Ah!
I sort of disagree. Knowing C would help in some situations, but not knowing it shouldn't be a deal breaker.
Objective-C is really a high level dynamic language built on C, so some of the low level-ness of C shows through (objects are actual pointers, etc).
But the Cocoa APIs are like something you would expect in a dynamic language.