Allison Newman said:
It's just that I can't help thinking about all of the comments that
we see on this list from people coming from Java or some other
language where header files aren't necessary, or which don't have
pointers. They are confused by these things, and having to learn
that at the same time as learning Cocoa itself makes for a very
steep learning curve.
Indeed.
I was one of the Java people you referred to. Nowadays, my day-time
job is game programming in C and I dabble on Objective-C/Cocoa when
time permits, so I think I've now gotten used to header files and
pointers. But those things still feel to me as nothing more than
fossils.
I know that Obj-C is more dynamic than Java (and that's quite
important for Cocoa to work its magic), but if Apple had never
developed Cocoa and were to do it now, from scratch, I doubt that they
would choose to do it in a language that sits atop of C. With the
exception of the id and SEL types, categories, and the fact that you
can send messages to nil, I can't think of anything in Obj-C that
isn't done better in Java, with the added benefits that Java has no
header files, no include cycles, no pointers, and has automatic memory
management that works (judging from another thread in this list,
garbage collection in Obj-C 2.0 has some wrinkles).
I wonder how much more productive Cocoa programmers are in a parallel
universe where Cocoa's native language is Java, with some extensions
added to the language to support the extra features mentioned above.
I never understood why Apple stopped supporting the Java bridge to
Cocoa.
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