Why Objective-C is Hard

Re:Why Objective-C is Hard by ctide on Tuesday March 06, 2012 @01:40PM (#3672228)

I actually find it much harder to read as a result of it's verbosity. For example, just yesterday I ran into a bug with these 2 lines:

    if ([[data objectForKey:@"released"] isKindOfClass:[NSNull class]]) {
    if ([[data objectForKey:@"posterUrl"] isKindOfClass:[NSString class]]) {

They weren't right next to each other, and at a glance, I misread to assume they were doing the same thing. There's too much shit in the way of the actual differences (NSNull vs. NSString in this case) that I have a bad tendency to gloss over the details. Coming from ruby, the closest syntactical equivalent:

    if (data['released'].class == NilClass) {
    if (data['posterUrl'].class == String) {

Is so much clearer to me when glancing through code. That doesn't even touch on how you'd actually write that sort of thing (data['released'].nil?) which is infinitely more concise than either example. I know this is a bit of a contrived example, and I certainly could find better ones. I just find the 120 character long method evocations to consistently blur the details for me, and this just happens to be the freshest instance.

To be fair, I've only been doing iOS stuff for about a month. Does this trend reverse after you've been writing obj-c for a while?

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Re:Why Objective-C is Hard by AshFurrow on Tuesday March 06, 2012 @02:16PM (#3672368)

I've found after a while you get really used to the verbosity. I miss it when I return to other languages.

For instance, I look at the first example you posted and I know exactly what it does. It's very natural for me to read.

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Re:Why Objective-C is Hard by chc on Tuesday March 06, 2012 @02:35PM (#3672446)

Is it really easier than `data['poster_url'].is_a? String`? I wouldn't call the Objective-C example unreadable, but it's certainly a lot more line noise for not a lot more meaning.

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Re:Why Objective-C is Hard by donmcc on Tuesday March 06, 2012 @03:17PM (#3672656)

You do get used to it. Because it's a superset of C, Objective-C has all the syntactic noise of C and some of its own. Ruby is certainly more compact, though with its Perl influence, you can write very cryptic Ruby code. You do pay a price in Objective-C in order to have C directly and immediately available.

FWIW, extracting nested expressions into local variables helps a lot with nested method calls.

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Re:Why Objective-C is Hard by wvs on Tuesday March 06, 2012 @03:27PM (#3672699)

Key-value accessors aren't exactly the shining moment of verbose method names (It's even been leaked that 10.8 has dict[key] sugar), but for methods with more parameters, it's much nicer than positional. e.g.:

connection:didReceiveResponse: addObserverForName:object:queue:usingBlock: drawAtPoint:forWidth:withFont:minFontSize:actualFontSize:lineBreakMode:baselineAdjustment:

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