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I think a lot of programmers these days just get too sucked into the tooling for their specific language. This is of course especially bad in JavaScript land.

I think a lot of programmers these days just get too sucked into the tooling for their specific language. This is of course especially bad in JavaScript land. I’ve met many JavaScript programmers who are just good at gluing together various JavaScript libraries, but aren’t really proficient generally. For example: you might be really good with redux, which is its own confusing stringy disaster, but not really understand the fundamentals that make it function. It makes me happy to find out that colleges mostly teach python now, although I don’t agree with the MO now being that everything lives in a venv. In my opinion, open up IDLE and get to work. Virtual environments just add another level of confusion! GO, and C, and also JavaScript are all great too of course and I use most them in a given week. I think if you focus on programming, and look at tooling as just extra convenience, then you won’t have problems learning new languages. (Except objective C, which objectively sucks.)

spacedcowboy 5y ago
> Except objective C, which objectively sucks Objective-C is my preferred language. - It has the complexity/expressiveness balance correct, it's not the 'point a warhead at your head' of C++, neither is it the primitive belt-and-braces approach of C. - It has a relaxed memory-allocation model with ARC that I very rarely have to worry about, and when I do, it's fairly obvious what to do. Generally just call [object-class new] and forget about it. - It's binary compatible with C and C++, so if I really need the speed of either of those two, I just drop into them instead for the small amount of code I need, or use a library. - It's named-parameters to methods make it easy to understand what a method in a class will do - though it's sometimes carried to extremes I agree. - It has a really nice standard library that comes with it, and the framework/bundle idea makes packaging things up really easy - In the debugger, I can always call a long stream of nested method-calls and get back the expected result, because message-calls are not function-calls. - No dependencies are needed for any produced code (well, you need the system frameworks, but that's like saying libc.so is a dependency). You don't have to worry about whether you have PHP v5,6,7,... or Python 2.x vs 3.x. Just run the app. All that for some [...] syntax. Except that a lot of that isn't even necessary any more with the '.' property-like syntax. No, it's not memory-safe - and that would be nice, but you'd give up the ability to just drop into C/C++, which is too high a cost IMHO. It's just a shame ~Apple~ Lattner decided he wanted to do his own language instead of continuing to improve ObjC.
- eddieh 5y ago
  I, unapologetically, love Objective-C too. So much so that I registered https://objc-lang.org https://objc-lang.org. I haven't done much with it. It is hosted from this repo: https://github.com/objc-lang/objc-lang.org https://github.com/objc-lang/objc-lang.org

spacedcowboy 5y ago

> Except objective C, which objectively sucks Objective-C is my preferred language. - It has the complexity/expressiveness balance correct, it's not the 'point a warhead at your head' of C++, neither is it the primitive belt-and-braces approach of C. - It has a relaxed memory-allocation model with ARC that I very rarely have to worry about, and when I do, it's fairly obvious what to do. Generally just call [object-class new] and forget about it. - It's binary compatible with C and C++, so if I really need the speed of either of those two, I just drop into them instead for the small amount of code I need, or use a library. - It's named-parameters to methods make it easy to understand what a method in a class will do - though it's sometimes carried to extremes I agree. - It has a really nice standard library that comes with it, and the framework/bundle idea makes packaging things up really easy - In the debugger, I can always call a long stream of nested method-calls and get back the expected result, because message-calls are not function-calls. - No dependencies are needed for any produced code (well, you need the system frameworks, but that's like saying libc.so is a dependency). You don't have to worry about whether you have PHP v5,6,7,... or Python 2.x vs 3.x. Just run the app. All that for some [...] syntax. Except that a lot of that isn't even necessary any more with the '.' property-like syntax. No, it's not memory-safe - and that would be nice, but you'd give up the ability to just drop into C/C++, which is too high a cost IMHO. It's just a shame ~Apple~ Lattner decided he wanted to do his own language instead of continuing to improve ObjC.

eddieh 5y ago
I, unapologetically, love Objective-C too. So much so that I registered https://objc-lang.org https://objc-lang.org. I haven't done much with it. It is hosted from this repo: https://github.com/objc-lang/objc-lang.org https://github.com/objc-lang/objc-lang.org