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As a C# developer, I can read and understand the code without any issues. That's a good thing for Apple. I'm sure Objective-C is great but it's too foreign for

by gokhan 12y ago

As a C# developer, I can read and understand the code without any issues. That's a good thing for Apple. I'm sure Objective-C is great but it's too foreign for me and didn't want to toy with it for fun, not worth the effort. But I can write an app or two with this one.

matthewmacleod 12y ago
I get where you're coming from - but in my experience, the barrier is totally psychological. Objective C isn't that unusual a language - the syntax is a bit foreign, but nothing that takes more than a couple of days to wrap your head around. You'll spend far more time getting to grips with Cocoa/Cocoa Touch.
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago
  That's my problem. I can't even find the entry point for this application. Looking at AppDelegate.swift I see an unused var (window) and that's it.
  - matthewmacleod 12y ago
    @UIApplicationMain is the key there, from what I can see. An Objective C iOS app typically includes a main.m entry point which calls UIApplicationMain and passes the AppDelegate. This seems to have been removed in favour of what Swift is calling a "declaration attribute", which presumably does the same thing. In this sense, the code is even less clear than the Objective C implementation.
    - sAuronas 12y ago
      They removed the need for main by making global scope the entry point.
- untog 12y ago
  the barrier is totally psychological Of course it is. It's certainly not a physical barrier. But psychological or not, other languages don't have a similar barrier.
  - matthewmacleod 12y ago
    Okay, I meant more that there's not a skills barrier in terms of actually learning to use the language. The syntax can be intimidating, but once you've spent a couple of hours with it, it's not an issue any more. It's far more difficult to get to grips with how the APIs work.
  - robterrell 12y ago
    > other languages don't have a similar barrier Lisps have the RPN psychological barrier. Python has the significant whitespace psychological barrier. etc. Any language can present someone with some psychological barrier. I think the OP's strongest point was, Objective-C the language is pretty trivial to learn quickly (after all, it's just C with message passing). You'll spend far longer trying to learn the Cocoa APIs than you will spend learning Objective-C-the-language. For instance, I decided to try to learn swift and SpriteKit at the same time. I spent far longer looking up methods on SKSpriteNode than I did looking up language constructs. (i.e. I assumed "let" was the same as in ES6 and couldn't figure out why the compiler was mad.)

by gokhan 12y ago

matthewmacleod 12y ago

I get where you're coming from - but in my experience, the barrier is totally psychological. Objective C isn't that unusual a language - the syntax is a bit foreign, but nothing that takes more than a couple of days to wrap your head around. You'll spend far more time getting to grips with Cocoa/Cocoa Touch.

WorldWideWayne 12y ago
That's my problem. I can't even find the entry point for this application. Looking at AppDelegate.swift I see an unused var (window) and that's it.
- matthewmacleod 12y ago
  @UIApplicationMain is the key there, from what I can see. An Objective C iOS app typically includes a main.m entry point which calls UIApplicationMain and passes the AppDelegate. This seems to have been removed in favour of what Swift is calling a "declaration attribute", which presumably does the same thing. In this sense, the code is even less clear than the Objective C implementation.
  - sAuronas 12y ago
    They removed the need for main by making global scope the entry point.
untog 12y ago
the barrier is totally psychological Of course it is. It's certainly not a physical barrier. But psychological or not, other languages don't have a similar barrier.
- matthewmacleod 12y ago
  Okay, I meant more that there's not a skills barrier in terms of actually learning to use the language. The syntax can be intimidating, but once you've spent a couple of hours with it, it's not an issue any more. It's far more difficult to get to grips with how the APIs work.
- robterrell 12y ago
  > other languages don't have a similar barrier Lisps have the RPN psychological barrier. Python has the significant whitespace psychological barrier. etc. Any language can present someone with some psychological barrier. I think the OP's strongest point was, Objective-C the language is pretty trivial to learn quickly (after all, it's just C with message passing). You'll spend far longer trying to learn the Cocoa APIs than you will spend learning Objective-C-the-language. For instance, I decided to try to learn swift and SpriteKit at the same time. I spent far longer looking up methods on SKSpriteNode than I did looking up language constructs. (i.e. I assumed "let" was the same as in ES6 and couldn't figure out why the compiler was mad.)