Objective-C's niche: why it survives in a world of alternatives

Re:Objective-C's niche: why it survives in a world of altern... by mr_dbr on Monday October 12, 2009 @04:19PM (#877544)

Good or bad, I'd say Apple are pretty much stuck with ObjC. Cocoa and all the other frameworks OS X uses are written like they are because of the language's syntax. This is demonstrated by how crappy the PyObjC code looks (compared to "regular" Python):

    notificationCenter.addObserver_selector_name_object_(
        notificationHandler,
        "handleMountNotification:",
        NSWorkspaceDidMountNotification,
        None)

To make it work with some other language (say, C#/C++/Ruby/Brainfuck/Python or whatever) would basically be a complete redesign of the framework, which in turn would basically be a complete redesign of OS X.. And why? Objective C is a perfectly decent language.. I'm not sure anyone would be using it where it not for Carbon/Cocoa, but it's not a bad language at all

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Re:Objective-C's niche: why it survives in a world of altern... by dchest on Monday October 12, 2009 @06:28PM (#877810)

MacRuby:

  notificationCenter.addObserver(notificationHandler, 
                        selector:"handleMoundNotification",                
                        name:NSWorkspaceDidMountNotification,
                        object:nil)

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Re:Objective-C's niche: why it survives in a world of altern... by azirr on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @06:19AM (#878765)

Yes, the messaging syntax (which is very expressive) makes it hard to use other languages with Cocoa, but not all. Your example in F-Script gives:

  notificationCenter addObserver:notificationHandler
                     selector:#handleMountNotification:
                     name:NSWorkspaceDidMountNotification
                     object:nil

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