3 ms·

With autocomplete you don't get much extra exercise anyway. It helps to strain your brain less however when reading the code.

chc 15y ago
I don't think "arrayByAddingObjectsFromArray:" is particularly clearer than "concat" or "+" unless you're just totally unfamiliar with the language. In fact, for many selectors I find the shorter names easier to read because my brain sees them as a single token while I have to mentally parse Cocoa's behemoths every time I run across them. There is some benefit to clarity, but very often Objective-C's glut of information makes it harder to pick out the details you were looking for. Smalltalk was considered quite readable and in fact was the inspiration for Objective-C and Cocoa, but its selectors were more minimal (for example, the equivalent to the above methods is #addAll:). (Just to establish that I'm not completely talking out my rear end: I've been programming Objective-C for ten years, Ruby for five.)
- kennywinker 15y ago
  oh crap, does concat create a new object, or mutate the current one? is it the same as using + or do they handle objects differently....? should I be using << here maybe? I agree with you that the verbosity of ObjC makes it harder to mentally parse fast, but I also think there is a lot of clarity to it when you read it slow. Where I see ObjC fall down is more in terms of command verbosity. For example in Ruby, File.open("readfile.rb", "r") do |infile| while (line = infile.gets) puts "#{line}" end end ...would be ~150 lines of code in ObjC (Dave DeLong: http://stackoverflow.com/a/3711079/196358 http://stackoverflow.com/a/3711079/196358). Which is not really a failing of the language, actually. It's a failing of the libraries that come with the language. Apple chose to give you a couple ways to read a file. The easy way is `stringWithContentsOfFile:encoding:error:error`, but the next level of control is way to low level. Dave DeLong's solution to reading a file line by line exposes an api that looks like this: DDFileReader * reader = [[DDFileReader alloc] initWithFilePath:pathToMyFile]; [reader enumerateLinesUsingBlock:^(NSString * line, BOOL * stop) { NSLog(@"%@", line); }]; Not actually much more complex or verbose than the ruby.

chc 15y ago

I don't think "arrayByAddingObjectsFromArray:" is particularly clearer than "concat" or "+" unless you're just totally unfamiliar with the language. In fact, for many selectors I find the shorter names easier to read because my brain sees them as a single token while I have to mentally parse Cocoa's behemoths every time I run across them. There is some benefit to clarity, but very often Objective-C's glut of information makes it harder to pick out the details you were looking for. Smalltalk was considered quite readable and in fact was the inspiration for Objective-C and Cocoa, but its selectors were more minimal (for example, the equivalent to the above methods is #addAll:). (Just to establish that I'm not completely talking out my rear end: I've been programming Objective-C for ten years, Ruby for five.)

kennywinker 15y ago
oh crap, does concat create a new object, or mutate the current one? is it the same as using + or do they handle objects differently....? should I be using << here maybe? I agree with you that the verbosity of ObjC makes it harder to mentally parse fast, but I also think there is a lot of clarity to it when you read it slow. Where I see ObjC fall down is more in terms of command verbosity. For example in Ruby, File.open("readfile.rb", "r") do |infile| while (line = infile.gets) puts "#{line}" end end ...would be ~150 lines of code in ObjC (Dave DeLong: http://stackoverflow.com/a/3711079/196358 http://stackoverflow.com/a/3711079/196358). Which is not really a failing of the language, actually. It's a failing of the libraries that come with the language. Apple chose to give you a couple ways to read a file. The easy way is `stringWithContentsOfFile:encoding:error:error`, but the next level of control is way to low level. Dave DeLong's solution to reading a file line by line exposes an api that looks like this: DDFileReader * reader = [[DDFileReader alloc] initWithFilePath:pathToMyFile]; [reader enumerateLinesUsingBlock:^(NSString * line, BOOL * stop) { NSLog(@"%@", line); }]; Not actually much more complex or verbose than the ruby.