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The major concern I have with something like RubyMotion is that Objective-C - the language it stands in for - is not a difficult language. The Cocoa/CocoaTouch

The major concern I have with something like RubyMotion is that Objective-C - the language it stands in for - is not a difficult language. The Cocoa/CocoaTouch API and its verbosity is the real problem, and I think that trying to map the extensive documentation written in Objective-C to a Ruby equivalent runs the risk of adding too much mental overhead. That it requires a paid-for license means that Ruby specific documentation will be comparatively thin on the ground, and the same applies to the resources found on StackOverflow. I'm a Ruby developer, and I find Obj-C a nice language to work with (though I do prefer the s-expression style in favour of the more recent dot notation). I still haven't managed to justify using Ruby in place of Objective-C. The only major benefit I see is the REPL that ties into the simulator, and losing the dependency on X-Code, but again, I feel that the verbosity of the APIs is the fault for that.

qrush 14y ago
It hasn't been that hard for me to translate Objective-C code into Ruby. The hardest thing has been APIs that have varargs that end in nil for some reason. Recently the RubyMotion team published this yardoc that translates all of the existing APIs for you into Ruby: http://www.rubymotion.com/developer-center/api/index.html http://www.rubymotion.com/developer-center/api/index.html But I didn't refer to that for the majority of the development since it wasn't around yet...I was knee-deep in the Apple docs for most of it.
- FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
  I think that's an issue of moving from Objective-C (and pure C), to what is normally a dynamic language. Using nil as a final argument (also called the 'sentinel') is fine for C to mark the end of a variable length array like it expects with 'strings' (so it doesn't stretch into the next unrelated block of memory), but you'd expect Ruby to handle that for you. Because in any other circumstance, it does.
  - bdittmer 14y ago
    Objective-C is dynamically typed.

qrush 14y ago

It hasn't been that hard for me to translate Objective-C code into Ruby. The hardest thing has been APIs that have varargs that end in nil for some reason. Recently the RubyMotion team published this yardoc that translates all of the existing APIs for you into Ruby: http://www.rubymotion.com/developer-center/api/index.html http://www.rubymotion.com/developer-center/api/index.html But I didn't refer to that for the majority of the development since it wasn't around yet...I was knee-deep in the Apple docs for most of it.

FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
I think that's an issue of moving from Objective-C (and pure C), to what is normally a dynamic language. Using nil as a final argument (also called the 'sentinel') is fine for C to mark the end of a variable length array like it expects with 'strings' (so it doesn't stretch into the next unrelated block of memory), but you'd expect Ruby to handle that for you. Because in any other circumstance, it does.
- bdittmer 14y ago
  Objective-C is dynamically typed.