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ReactiveCocoa for a better world
- swannodette 14y agoAwesome to see GitHub getting behind Rx ideas. If you're a JS developer RxJS is definitely worthy of study: http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Introducing-RxJS-Reactive-Extensions-for-JavaScript http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Introducing-RxJS-Reac...
- eblume 14y agoThis sounds neat, but I want to ask others here as I am not (yet) a Cocoa developer - is all Cocoa code this ugly? In these short examples I honestly can't fathom what is happening due to the syntactic 'oddities'. Maybe my C-variant-fu is not as strong as it should be.
- poutine 14y agoHeh, welcome to the learning curve :) Yeah, it can be ugly, but once you know what's going on it all reads pretty quickly.
- FuzzyDunlop 14y agoIt's not so bad if you give it space to spread out a little. The wrapping in the column makes it much more difficult to follow, especially when used with Xcode's unusual indent style.
- aarontait 14y agoObjective-C has a higher learning curve. But once you learn it, you will see the elegant beauty in it.
- gte910h 14y agoObjective C is smalltalk on top of C. It looks extremely bad when you stick it in the super skinny columnar formats of many blogs. At 80-300 characters per line it's fine and very readable.
- berntb 14y agoSo Objective C programmers can't print code to read it? :-(
- gte910h 14y agoWhat? The blog is displaying the text narrower than it shows up in a source file. This makes it uglier than it is in actual practice e.g. What ? The blog is displaying the text narrow- er than it shows up in a source file . This makes it uglier than it is in actual prac- tice
- berntb 14y agoI got the point, sorry if I was unclear. My point was, it is hard to print 300 chars wide code. Ideal code width for printing is < 80 chars...
- UK-AL 14y agoEh. You get used to it, then it looks normal. I guess it's the same 'wtf' when beginners see a bunch of meaningless code.
- wsc981 14y agoI guess the blocks-in-blocks code can get quite unreadable at times. Personally I like to store blocks in variables in such situations and add the variable to a function that required the block parameter. Makes code so much more readable when blocks are nested.
- joshaber 14y agoYeah, we played around with a bunch of different styles, including defining the block before its use. It looked cleaner but the code locality of defining them inline won.
- stcredzero 14y agoThis sounds neat, but I want to ask others here as I am not (yet) a Cocoa developer - is all Cocoa code this ugly? I am a Cocoa developer, and I have to say that the presentation of this idea on the blog leaves something to be desired. It seems to be oriented towards people already familiar with Reactive Programming and FP, but it doesn't set up that expectation at all. At the same time, it's very confusing and a little unintentionally off-putting for devs who aren't familiar with those notions, even for those who already know Objective-C and KVO. It still might be a good idea, though.
- joshaber 14y agoThat was my fear while I was writing the post :\ The problem with Rx / RAC is there's a big learning curve, especially coming from procedural programming. It's much bigger than 1 blog post can cover. My hope at least is that it will drive at least some people to dive deeper.
- irrationalfab 14y agoIt appears to be personal, but for many the answer is yes... that's why RubyMotion is a big deal.
- pablasso 14y agoRubyMotions looks even uglier for me. It's just like someone stripped all the beauty of Ruby with libraries that weren't meant to pair with it.
- irrationalfab 14y agoThe Objective-C syntax doesn't look strange to me, yet its verbosity make the whole picture more difficult to grasp than in Ruby in my opinion. It's somehow like difference between a document and a bullet point reppresentation of it. However, I haven't made my mind yet about RubyMotion. There are some propositions for it and some against and a lot has to come in the next weeks. Let's see what will happen. Note: I have been coding in Objective-C for two years and in Ruby for 1-2 months.
- aarontait 14y agoI wouldn't be surprised if something like this gets added to Foundation in the next couple years. It looks great!
- notJim 14y agoFor those not familiar, it looks like this is the take on ideas from Reactive Extensions (Rx): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg577609 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg577609. I'm not sure if Rx itself has a direct predecessor or not, but it's great to see the idea taking hold in other communities. I've long suspected that there is a lot of great stuff in the .Net world that most open-source-oriented programmers never see, simply because they don't have exposure to Microsoft technology.
- swannodette 14y agoI believe Rx is an OOish take on some older FP ideas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_programming
- xpaulbettsx 14y agoHere's what Rx is: The idea of a list are some items in an order (a Sequence in FP-speak). On top of a Sequence you can implement all kinds of interesting operations like map/filter/reduce. If you look at an Event like KeyUp, you'd end up with some items, in a particular order. Thus, you realize, that events and lists really are the same thing. In fact, they're not only ostensibly the same, they are mathematically provable to be the same. Rx therefore, gives you all the operations you can do to a list, and applies it to an event (or a callback, which is just an event that only happens once).
- scarmig 14y agoI enjoyed your book! Are there any plans for an updated or expanded version? If anyone wants a simple introduction to Rx, Paul Betts (and Jesse Liberty) wrote one last year. http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Reactive-Extensions-Jesse-Liberty/dp/1430237473/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336164661&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Reactive-Extensions-Jesse-...
- xpaulbettsx 14y agoThanks! No plans for a 2nd edition yet, but I definitely have a lot I'd like to add.
- scarmig 14y agoStuff like this makes me want to drop the WebForms work I'm doing for rent and work on my FRP library... le sigh.
- gte910h 14y agoThis makes me happy happy. It will detangle some big apps I'm on.
- tablatom 14y agoFor those unfamiliar with ObjectiveC syntax, this[1] is a very nice example, in JavaScript, of how amazing this idea is. [1] https://github.com/Reactive-Extensions/rxjs-html https://github.com/Reactive-Extensions/rxjs-html
- boothead 14y agoThis looks a lot like Functional Reactive Programming from the haskell world... Anyone who knows care to comment on how similar they are?
- objclxt 14y agoI've just spent a few hours getting to know ReactiveCocoa better, and what a great framework! Props to GitHub for open sourcing it, and I'm already looking at how to integrate it into some of my apps. I blogged about my first impressions here: http://cleveryou.net/post/22447309056/rac-first-impressions http://cleveryou.net/post/22447309056/rac-first-impressions