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You should try building an iPhone app and see how it compares. I have, and Android wins for me. Cocoa Touch is a decent API (in most cases; what's with NSImage

You should try building an iPhone app and see how it compares. I have, and Android wins for me. Cocoa Touch is a decent API (in most cases; what's with NSImage vs CGImage vs CIImage?), but Objective-C is seriously outdated. It usually needs more boilerplate than even Java, and manual memory management, lack of namespaces, and header files are silly in 2010.

KirinDave 17y ago
Well ObjC straddles a very interesting place. It's as low-level as C++ but has high level message passing method dispatch as well. If it seems a little crufty, it's because it's living in a very peculiar place trying to serve a variety of masters. Hopefully 4.0 will start to pave the way for the ObjC2.0 stuff to come to iPhone. They are really big improvements to the language. Also, rule-based syntax translators could give you a ton of stuff as a preprocessing pass to your code. Write something for NSArray literals and you'll be a hero.
- crux_ 17y ago
  Isn't one of the big problems here that "rule-based syntax translators" are kind of disallowed?
  - KirinDave 17y ago
    Not if they produce straightforward objective c. How would one even separate such code generation from the use of regular #define?
    - daeken 17y ago
      You're right, they couldn't tell. But that doesn't mean they're not disallowed -- unless you're writing C, C++, Obj-C, or Javascript, it's disallowed, period. But that doesn't mean people won't do it.
      - KirinDave 17y ago
        I'm not sure I agree that code translation is entirely disallowed. Part of the problem, though, is that the legalese in the iphone 4 revision is maddeningly obscure and unhelpful. We're not even sure if embedded Lua interpreters are really banned. I'm sure Apple is considering that very question.
- elai 17y ago
  Yes, something to replace the super crufty NSArray / NSMutableArray / NSSet / NSDictionary, syntax would be really good. Small talk message passing was meant to have short, small one symbol binary operators, but unfortunately that elegance is not there in objective c.
  - glhaynes 17y ago
    Over the life of the code, I'm only gonna type it once; I may read it a hundred times.
    - elai 17y ago
      To be honest with you [[stuff objectAtIndex:5] objectForKey:@"name"] is less readable than stuff[5][@"name"]. And you type this kind of code constantly over and over again, it can really stack up and create something that would be simple to read in other languages.
      - cpr 17y ago
        Except that if you're used to Smalltalk, this is just standard fare. I agree that a Python-like shorthand would be great at the object level, but then you'd have a mixture of shorthand and longhand, and that would be ugly.
- cpr 17y ago
  Yes, looks like Obj-C blocks made it to 4.0. GC is probably a ways off for obvious reasons.
- irons 17y ago
  To be pedantic, "Objective-C 2.0" features are things the iPhone always had, like properties and fast enumeration, and/or had first, like the modern runtime (which solves the fragile base class problem, and which Mac apps still only get if they're 64-bit). Blocks were a Snow Leopard feature, implemented as a C extension, and sprinkled throughout Apple's APIs; no direct relationship to Obj-C.
  - KirinDave 17y ago
    I was thinking more along the lines of the garbage collector. That's sort of the "tent pole" feature of the last cycle of objc revisions.
    - irons 17y ago
      With the first iPad model still at 256 MB RAM, and no sign of GC in the iPhone OS 4 preview, memory management will be with the platform for a long time. I think we'll see multi-core first.
      - KirinDave 17y ago
        There are collectors that work very well in space constrained, processor constrained environments. It's not impossible.
swannodette 17y ago
> more boilerplate than Java whatever. Objective-C is far closer to the elegant dynamism of SmallTalk than Java. > manual memory management Makes sense. This is a resource constrained device. > lack of namespaces This is a phone not an enterprise server. > header files On a device with an underpowered processor the focus on C-based languaged has been paying back serious dividends as far as the responsiveness of the platform's applications.
umjames 17y ago
Assuming we're only talking about the iPhone APIs, then there's no NSImage or CIImage (Mac OS X desktop only). As for UIImage and CGImageRef, which are on the iPhone, UIImage is an Objective-C class, whereas CGImageRef is a C opaque struct. CGImageRef comes from the CoreGraphics (aka Quartz) lower-level 2D drawing APIs (implemented using C functions). This framework was around before the iPhone as it is also found in the Mac OS X APIs. UIImage gives you the ability to use a CGImageRef as an object. It doesn't expose all of the functionality found at the CoreGraphics layer, but it can be easier to use with other ObjC classes.
- orangecat 17y ago
  You're right, I was thinking of desktop Mac OS X there, and an especially annoying section of code where I was trying to get those three image APIs to talk to each other. Apple did in fact remove a lot of cruft and duplication in the iPhone API, and that's good. Still, there are a number of cases like that where you have to switch between ObjC method calls and straight C functions. Not a huge deal, but it's clearly not the SmallTalk-style pure OO.

KirinDave 17y ago

Well ObjC straddles a very interesting place. It's as low-level as C++ but has high level message passing method dispatch as well. If it seems a little crufty, it's because it's living in a very peculiar place trying to serve a variety of masters. Hopefully 4.0 will start to pave the way for the ObjC2.0 stuff to come to iPhone. They are really big improvements to the language. Also, rule-based syntax translators could give you a ton of stuff as a preprocessing pass to your code. Write something for NSArray literals and you'll be a hero.

crux_ 17y ago
Isn't one of the big problems here that "rule-based syntax translators" are kind of disallowed?
- KirinDave 17y ago
  Not if they produce straightforward objective c. How would one even separate such code generation from the use of regular #define?
  - daeken 17y ago
    You're right, they couldn't tell. But that doesn't mean they're not disallowed -- unless you're writing C, C++, Obj-C, or Javascript, it's disallowed, period. But that doesn't mean people won't do it.
    - KirinDave 17y ago
      I'm not sure I agree that code translation is entirely disallowed. Part of the problem, though, is that the legalese in the iphone 4 revision is maddeningly obscure and unhelpful. We're not even sure if embedded Lua interpreters are really banned. I'm sure Apple is considering that very question.
elai 17y ago
Yes, something to replace the super crufty NSArray / NSMutableArray / NSSet / NSDictionary, syntax would be really good. Small talk message passing was meant to have short, small one symbol binary operators, but unfortunately that elegance is not there in objective c.
- glhaynes 17y ago
  Over the life of the code, I'm only gonna type it once; I may read it a hundred times.
  - elai 17y ago
    To be honest with you [[stuff objectAtIndex:5] objectForKey:@"name"] is less readable than stuff[5][@"name"]. And you type this kind of code constantly over and over again, it can really stack up and create something that would be simple to read in other languages.
    - cpr 17y ago
      Except that if you're used to Smalltalk, this is just standard fare. I agree that a Python-like shorthand would be great at the object level, but then you'd have a mixture of shorthand and longhand, and that would be ugly.
cpr 17y ago
Yes, looks like Obj-C blocks made it to 4.0. GC is probably a ways off for obvious reasons.
irons 17y ago
To be pedantic, "Objective-C 2.0" features are things the iPhone always had, like properties and fast enumeration, and/or had first, like the modern runtime (which solves the fragile base class problem, and which Mac apps still only get if they're 64-bit). Blocks were a Snow Leopard feature, implemented as a C extension, and sprinkled throughout Apple's APIs; no direct relationship to Obj-C.
- KirinDave 17y ago
  I was thinking more along the lines of the garbage collector. That's sort of the "tent pole" feature of the last cycle of objc revisions.
  - irons 17y ago
    With the first iPad model still at 256 MB RAM, and no sign of GC in the iPhone OS 4 preview, memory management will be with the platform for a long time. I think we'll see multi-core first.
    - KirinDave 17y ago
      There are collectors that work very well in space constrained, processor constrained environments. It's not impossible.

swannodette 17y ago

> more boilerplate than Java whatever. Objective-C is far closer to the elegant dynamism of SmallTalk than Java. > manual memory management Makes sense. This is a resource constrained device. > lack of namespaces This is a phone not an enterprise server. > header files On a device with an underpowered processor the focus on C-based languaged has been paying back serious dividends as far as the responsiveness of the platform's applications.

umjames 17y ago

Assuming we're only talking about the iPhone APIs, then there's no NSImage or CIImage (Mac OS X desktop only). As for UIImage and CGImageRef, which are on the iPhone, UIImage is an Objective-C class, whereas CGImageRef is a C opaque struct. CGImageRef comes from the CoreGraphics (aka Quartz) lower-level 2D drawing APIs (implemented using C functions). This framework was around before the iPhone as it is also found in the Mac OS X APIs. UIImage gives you the ability to use a CGImageRef as an object. It doesn't expose all of the functionality found at the CoreGraphics layer, but it can be easier to use with other ObjC classes.

orangecat 17y ago
You're right, I was thinking of desktop Mac OS X there, and an especially annoying section of code where I was trying to get those three image APIs to talk to each other. Apple did in fact remove a lot of cruft and duplication in the iPhone API, and that's good. Still, there are a number of cases like that where you have to switch between ObjC method calls and straight C functions. Not a huge deal, but it's clearly not the SmallTalk-style pure OO.