This. After the addition of blocks, Grand Central Dispatch, and the booting of garbage collection in favour of ARC, ObjC is a pleasure to code in and to see it perform. As mentioned, KVC/KVO have made the UI code for my app much simpler than without them.

I'd add that one not be fooled by the apparent verbosity of the "selectors", which is the ObjC equivalent of lisp parens that hits folks new to the language. Their cognitive overhead (for me) is rather low, and they make the code readable without profuse commenting. XCode has been a pleasure as well (despite the occasional crashes), due to the live code correctness feedback (thanks to llvm/clang), auto-complete and auto-correct.

Overall, practically everything's been improving in iOS land as far as I can tell.

I agree, Obj-C has improved a lot. But it's not just Obj-C vs. Ruby:

- you can use the editor of your choice and the terminal instead of Xcode

- you can use the interactive console to debug your app or to live test new code

- you get all the great wrapper gems like BubbleWrap which are heavily influenced by the "rails way" of doing things

Do you know these to be facts or are you just regurgitating something you've read or heard elsewhere?

Because:

> you can use the editor of your choice and the terminal instead of Xcode.

This is possible with Obj-C, but using Xcode is a far superior experience to RubyMotion and any editor.

> you can use the interactive console to debug your app or to live test new code

Ditto for lldb in Xcode

> you get all the great wrapper gems like BubbleWrap which are heavily influenced by the "rails way" of doing things

There are plenty of powerful 3rd party Obj-C abstractions too.

Using Xcode is a shit experience, it crashes numerous times each day, creates zombie processes when testing in the simulator, and has something like 1000 tiny problems that are irritating. LLDB is powerful, but not a proper REPL.

> using Xcode is a far superior experience to RubyMotion and any editor

Yesterday I had to convert a list of constants into mathematical operations. Took ten seconds to make the macro in vim, and then I ran it twenty times in a second. Compare with the five to ten minutes it would have taken doing option+arrow around the numbers to add characters before and after.

I've turned off all of Xcode's text editing functionality (except for esc to code complete) because it was interfering with typing instead of helping. I've tried to turn off all the "jump to error" stuff in the settings, but it still insists on jumping to the disassembly for main() when it hits an error.

Yeah I have to admit if they added first class vim keybindings to XCode it would have probably swayed me away from RubyMotion.

What about AppCode and the vim plugin that goes with all Jetbrains IDEs

> using Xcode is a far superior experience to RubyMotion and any editor.

XCode is not ideal for people accustomed to, say, vim. I love the static code analysis and the autocomplete and storyboards are pretty cool too. But having to edit text like a normal human instead of using vim sucks and the split pane handling is garbage. I would rather do all my dev in vim.

Xcode has command line tools. You don't have to use the GUI exclusively. Also I know at least one developer that uses vim for editing but uses Xcode for building. It's probably in your best interest to use some combination (e.g. Xcode for configuring your build settings)

Did you know you can have Vim keybindings in Xcode?

As it happens, ViEmu has just launched their product on XCode as well. From the couple of days in use, I'm quite pleased with it in comparison with Vicious that I used before that.

http://www.viemu.com/download-xcode.html

Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out!

The XVim plugin? That's hardly a complete implementation.

xvim is super alpha... the visual studio guys just released a vim plugin for xcode too... I haven't used the xcode one yet but if it's as good as the visual studio one it should be very good. (I have contributed to xvim and I have purchased the visual studio plugin)

I might have to look into this visual studio plugin, thanks.

Having parts of a string perform operations on a container is not elegant, it's a crutch for the lack of availability of generic operations or something like LINQ. Many of Objective-C's interesting features have this problem that either they're too magical, have an odd syntax or are leaky abstractions due to the limitations of backward compatibility.