Ask HN: What do you think of Objective-C?

Re:Ask HN: What do you think of Objective-C? by sqs on Wednesday December 17, 2008 @11:18PM (#401795)

I really like Objective-C. I had been using mostly Ruby before I started Obj-C (to make a quick iPhone app), and I liked it so much that I ended up going even further and doing about half of my programming in C++. Obj-C was a nice introduction to using a compiled language in real code that did stuff (as opposed to CS homework, which was my only previous C experience). When I wanted to make real stuff (servers), though, Obj-C wouldn't work since it had few libraries and relied heavily (in practice) on Apple's implementation of NS* classes.

If you have programming experience, you should be able to learn 99% of Objective-C in about 5 hours.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you think of Objective-C? by derefr on Thursday December 18, 2008 @03:06AM (#401938)

You know, I always wondered why they don't have, as contrasted with the "For Dummies" series, "Yet Another Language: Foo" books: books that assume you already know every language but this one, are already down on all the theory behind the language, and just want to know the syntactic, library-usage, and perhaps semantic (for example, macros in Lisp) transforms to take the code you already know how to write and retool it.

The flagship books of the series would be for Java and PHP, marketed to people that otherwise abhor those languages, but have to whip them out for the requirements of a specific project.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you think of Objective-C? by tocomment on Thursday December 18, 2008 @09:22AM (#402120)

Don't forget idioms, such a book should also include programming idioms, so you don't end up writing Java code in Python, etc.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you think of Objective-C? by friism on Thursday December 18, 2008 @04:03AM (#401969)

For C# and Java, I can recommend Peter Sestofts Precisely books. They're short and to the point: http://www.itu.dk/~sestoft/javaprecisely/ http://www.itu.dk/~sestoft/csharpprecisely/ (Author is my thesis advisor, so beware)

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Re:Ask HN: What do you think of Objective-C? by potatolicious on Thursday December 18, 2008 @03:28AM (#401951)

I think there are some website guides out there (Google for 'em) that do a good job of introducing Obj-C to C++ coders.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you think of Objective-C? by sqs on Friday December 19, 2008 @10:45AM (#403423)

That's an excellent idea. Why don't you start writing them? I'll be your first customer.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you think of Objective-C? by gtufano on Thursday December 18, 2008 @06:23AM (#402026)

You can learn Objective-C in about 5 hours, true (probably less, if you know C and C++). The point being that Obj-C without NSObject (and cocoa framework) is not a big deal. The "good things" come from cocoa and Interface Builder. And you will need more than a few hour for cocoa. Obj-C by itself is C with a very thin OOP layer (and an associated frankly strange syntax for calling methods). Cocoa is a very interesting programming framework with wonderful programming tools.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you think of Objective-C? by stcredzero on Thursday December 18, 2008 @08:40AM (#402103)

I finally understand MVC! Cocoa makes really good use of Controllers. Even in a lot of the Smalltalks, controllers languish a bit.

The syntax for calling methods is from Smalltalk, BTW. It's just different. It makes the method names document the arguments.

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