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Even with RubyMotion, you have to still learn the full iOS API. There is no way around that. You save a little bit of syntax, but Xcode is a pretty good IDE so
by scorpion032 14y ago
Even with RubyMotion, you have to still learn the full iOS API. There is no way around that. You save a little bit of syntax, but Xcode is a pretty good IDE so that isn't the big deal.
The big deal is the community and culture of the open source that comes with Ruby folks. The number of open source RubyMotion applications is already perhaps higher than the objective C ones.
If I were to choose to build ONE iOS product today, I'd prefer to do it in the native objective C. But if I am a shop that plans to build quite a few of them, RubyMotion would be my choice.
- danneu 14y agoWhile I started with iOS development through the traditional route of those Stanford courses, I learned the bulk of my more in-depth knowledge after focusing on RubyMotion. "You'll still have to learn the iOS API" is true, but I think it's a red herring. Because RubyMotion isn't just swapping ObjC with Ruby, and there are more compelling reasons for trying out RubyMotion than "you get to use Ruby". RubyMotion is a vast simplification of the development environment (rake + vim), a set of wrappers that vastly simplify Cocoa Touch objects/libs, and a small helpful community that makes it easy to filter out signal from the noise when you hit an obstacle. And those are the reasons why RubyMotion helped me become a better iOS developer as a newbie. By wrapping Cocoa Touch in some painful areas, it helped me focus on learning the iOS framework at a higher level instead of wrestling with ceremony.
- cnp 14y agoI totally agree with this. I learned so much about iOS and Objective-C from starting development with RubyMotion. I guess that's my gotcha: you'll end up in Objective-C even if you're trying to avoid it, and that will be... just fine!