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Yes, MacRuby is something slightly different. Still, I would suggest people who are seriously interested in developing for the iPhone to check if plain Objecti
by cesare 17y ago
Yes, MacRuby is something slightly different.
Still, I would suggest people who are seriously interested in developing for the iPhone to check if plain Objective-C works for them, first.
My recipe is:
- Objective-C for the minimum necessary to deal with the iPhone specific APIs.
- plain C for critical parts which need to be optimized for speed and memory consumption.
- your favorite embeddable language implementation (mine at the moment is TinyScheme, but I've also used Lua) for scripting.
Also, consider that often you may need to include libraries written in c or c++. This is trivial to do from Objective-C.
- tumult 17y agoYes, I actually agree with you. Especially iPhone is a little ways off from being suitable for a scripting language.
- davidw 17y agoNo it isn't. As I said below, Hecl works fine on phones much slower than the iPhone. Ok, you don't want to do a big, huge complex app in a dynamic language, but they would be just fine for quick one-offs. Just like with regular computers...
- tumult 17y agoYeah, but that's not very interesting, so I don't include it :) You can do big complex apps in dynamic languages though. But iPhone is a somewhat restricted environment (not THAT restricted, really) where you are encouraged to use as small a footprint as reasonably possible.
- davidw 17y ago> Yeah, but that's not very interesting, so I don't include it :) Stuff like PHP indicates that plenty of people are quite happy to do quick one off's. Or Tcl/Tk for Unix, or VB for Windows. Scripting is a very sensible idea, and phones are quite capable of handling it these days. I think it's extremely interesting creating something that opens up development to more people.
- tumult 17y agoThe ends and the means are not necessarily the same thing! I would rather teach a new programmer Scheme, Python, Ruby etc than PHP, VB, etc.
- davidw 17y agoSure, those languages are better, but the point is making programming more accessible to more people (something Python has done quite well too, indeed).