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To each their own. I'm convinced it's just a visceral reaction to the square bracket syntax. Obj-C remains my favorite language of all time (although I haven't

To each their own. I'm convinced it's just a visceral reaction to the square bracket syntax. Obj-C remains my favorite language of all time (although I haven't written it in years). Having a high level language that allows you to seamlessly drop into C felt like magic.

deleted 2y ago
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nullpoint420 2y ago
I'm using Obj-C for the first time in years for a side project. I'm working on making a Wayland backend for cocotron on Linux. It is magical the way I can just use the C libraries with all the dynamic goodness Obj-C.
- Longhanks 2y ago
  There's even more magic: You can even use/include/write/mix and match ObjC with C++, within the same source file - C++ classes calling ObjC methods, ObjC methods instantiating C++ classes, it's all there. No other language comes close to this kind of interop with C++ and it is one feature that Swift will never be able to match (albeit intentionally).
  - tambourine_man 2y ago
    https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/ https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/
    - Longhanks 2y ago
      Yes, there is interop at the linking level. I was however explicitly stating that you can mix and match both ObjC and C++ within the same source files and as long as you don't violate the language rules of one with what's allowed in the other (e.g. giving your ObjC variable the name template), then absolutely any features, even language-wise, are supported. You can have C++ RAII destructors call ObjC methods. You can have C++ classes with an NSArray member. You can have a std::vector as a property of your ObjC class. You can mix and match libdispatch, std::call_once, ObjC blocks and C++ lambdas. No other language comes close to this incredible source-level interop. Here be dragons, but there's also lots of opportunity (and fun, from a programming languace theory perspective).
itslennysfault 2y ago
Interesting, I guess that part was missed on me since I only really ever used it for iPhone apps and never really had a need to use C directly. Also, you're 100% right. The square brackets are what immediately repulsed me and continued to befuddle me even after years of experience with it. Also, everything just feels "backwards" to me if that makes any sense. Coming from Java/C#/JavaScript everything just seemed unintuitive to me at all times. Also, I think this was heavily compounded by using xCode which (at the time) was incredibly laggy. So, I'd mess up the Obj-C syntax and the IDE wouldn't tell me for what felt like forever. Often I'd make a change and hit "play" before the syntax highlighting caught up and that always felt infuriating. I last used xCode about 4 years ago and it was still an issue then (even with swift).
- ramesh31 2y ago
  >"Also, everything just feels "backwards" to me if that makes any sense." Because it is. Obj-C comes from the Smalltalk lineage by way of Alan Kay, using message passing [0] versus method invocation. It's a subtle difference with huge implications to how you design systems. Method invocation won out mostly because of Java and C++, but there was a time it wasn't clear which was the better OO paradigm. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_passing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_passing
  - bunderbunder 2y ago
    Message passing belongs up there with lisp, forth and pure functional programming as paradigms that are worth learning for "the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it." But I often see that my peers in the profession lack the kind of growth mentality that enables a person to see past the alienness of less algol-y languages. Quote from "How To Become a Hacker" by Eric S. Raymond: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
    - em-bee 2y ago
      see my comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42132104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42132104 i can't tell the difference and therefore i don't see what profound enlightenment experience i am supposed to have.
jwells89 2y ago
For personal use, the only issue I take with Obj-C is how it's considerably less "batteries included" relative to Swift. For collaborative projects on the other hand, it can become a handful to maintain if everybody contributing isn't staying on top of hygiene with null checks, type checks, etc. Swift helps to keep all of that under control.
cxr 2y ago
Someone really ought to do an alternative "skin" for Objective-C. That is, define some reversible transformation that can be applied to any Objective-C program that only changes the surface-level details but otherwise results in mapping the exact same program into the later stages of the compiler (and the section of programmers' mental pipeline that comes after the part where their eyeballs and sense of taste are concerned). It's important that the reversible part be adhered to. It's really kind of a bummer that we don't have well-known examples of "skinnable" programming languages already. The closest we get are the ones that let you choose your set of keywords for different locales in case you don't want to work with an English-based PL and those block based languages that let you manipulate them as blocks or edit the textual form. I firmly believe that PL skinning would really benefit so many otherwise worthwhile languages that get short-shrift because of negative reactions to the surface-level details. I'm referring in particular languages like those in the Pascal family. (You could also conceive of e.g. a skin for Golang that doesn't have leading caps be the determiner for whether a function is public or not. There are lots of applications for this, and the variations are a non-issue when you have an ecosystem with strong norms about applying a code formatter (like gofmt), which can dictate the format of the canonical on-disk representation.)
- Aeglaecia 2y ago
  surely after 20 years this already exists , someone posted a header the other day that makes c syntax python like , macros are enough to accomplish what youre describing? i dont perceive it as efficient to force codebase contributors to relearn their ingrained language syntax , possibly more efficient for those having newly learned a language tho ...
  - cxr 2y ago
    > i dont perceive it as efficient to force codebase contributors to relearn their ingrained language syntax That's why it's important that the transformation be reversible and what the gofmt-like code formatters are for.
- mpweiher 2y ago
  The Four Stages of Objective-Smalltalk https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/12/the-4-stages-of-objective-smalltalk.html https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/12/the-4-stages-of-objectiv... Its first two stages are just that, but it has moved beyond, for good reasons.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

nullpoint420 2y ago

I'm using Obj-C for the first time in years for a side project. I'm working on making a Wayland backend for cocotron on Linux. It is magical the way I can just use the C libraries with all the dynamic goodness Obj-C.

Longhanks 2y ago
There's even more magic: You can even use/include/write/mix and match ObjC with C++, within the same source file - C++ classes calling ObjC methods, ObjC methods instantiating C++ classes, it's all there. No other language comes close to this kind of interop with C++ and it is one feature that Swift will never be able to match (albeit intentionally).
- tambourine_man 2y ago
  https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/ https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/
  - Longhanks 2y ago
    Yes, there is interop at the linking level. I was however explicitly stating that you can mix and match both ObjC and C++ within the same source files and as long as you don't violate the language rules of one with what's allowed in the other (e.g. giving your ObjC variable the name template), then absolutely any features, even language-wise, are supported. You can have C++ RAII destructors call ObjC methods. You can have C++ classes with an NSArray member. You can have a std::vector as a property of your ObjC class. You can mix and match libdispatch, std::call_once, ObjC blocks and C++ lambdas. No other language comes close to this incredible source-level interop. Here be dragons, but there's also lots of opportunity (and fun, from a programming languace theory perspective).

itslennysfault 2y ago

Interesting, I guess that part was missed on me since I only really ever used it for iPhone apps and never really had a need to use C directly. Also, you're 100% right. The square brackets are what immediately repulsed me and continued to befuddle me even after years of experience with it. Also, everything just feels "backwards" to me if that makes any sense. Coming from Java/C#/JavaScript everything just seemed unintuitive to me at all times. Also, I think this was heavily compounded by using xCode which (at the time) was incredibly laggy. So, I'd mess up the Obj-C syntax and the IDE wouldn't tell me for what felt like forever. Often I'd make a change and hit "play" before the syntax highlighting caught up and that always felt infuriating. I last used xCode about 4 years ago and it was still an issue then (even with swift).

ramesh31 2y ago
>"Also, everything just feels "backwards" to me if that makes any sense." Because it is. Obj-C comes from the Smalltalk lineage by way of Alan Kay, using message passing [0] versus method invocation. It's a subtle difference with huge implications to how you design systems. Method invocation won out mostly because of Java and C++, but there was a time it wasn't clear which was the better OO paradigm. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_passing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_passing
- bunderbunder 2y ago
  Message passing belongs up there with lisp, forth and pure functional programming as paradigms that are worth learning for "the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it." But I often see that my peers in the profession lack the kind of growth mentality that enables a person to see past the alienness of less algol-y languages. Quote from "How To Become a Hacker" by Eric S. Raymond: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
  - em-bee 2y ago
    see my comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42132104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42132104 i can't tell the difference and therefore i don't see what profound enlightenment experience i am supposed to have.

jwells89 2y ago

For personal use, the only issue I take with Obj-C is how it's considerably less "batteries included" relative to Swift. For collaborative projects on the other hand, it can become a handful to maintain if everybody contributing isn't staying on top of hygiene with null checks, type checks, etc. Swift helps to keep all of that under control.

cxr 2y ago

Someone really ought to do an alternative "skin" for Objective-C. That is, define some reversible transformation that can be applied to any Objective-C program that only changes the surface-level details but otherwise results in mapping the exact same program into the later stages of the compiler (and the section of programmers' mental pipeline that comes after the part where their eyeballs and sense of taste are concerned). It's important that the reversible part be adhered to. It's really kind of a bummer that we don't have well-known examples of "skinnable" programming languages already. The closest we get are the ones that let you choose your set of keywords for different locales in case you don't want to work with an English-based PL and those block based languages that let you manipulate them as blocks or edit the textual form. I firmly believe that PL skinning would really benefit so many otherwise worthwhile languages that get short-shrift because of negative reactions to the surface-level details. I'm referring in particular languages like those in the Pascal family. (You could also conceive of e.g. a skin for Golang that doesn't have leading caps be the determiner for whether a function is public or not. There are lots of applications for this, and the variations are a non-issue when you have an ecosystem with strong norms about applying a code formatter (like gofmt), which can dictate the format of the canonical on-disk representation.)

Aeglaecia 2y ago
surely after 20 years this already exists , someone posted a header the other day that makes c syntax python like , macros are enough to accomplish what youre describing? i dont perceive it as efficient to force codebase contributors to relearn their ingrained language syntax , possibly more efficient for those having newly learned a language tho ...
- cxr 2y ago
  > i dont perceive it as efficient to force codebase contributors to relearn their ingrained language syntax That's why it's important that the transformation be reversible and what the gofmt-like code formatters are for.
mpweiher 2y ago
The Four Stages of Objective-Smalltalk https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/12/the-4-stages-of-objective-smalltalk.html https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/12/the-4-stages-of-objectiv... Its first two stages are just that, but it has moved beyond, for good reasons.