It’s funny. I originally got into GNUStep because I’m a history buff and the NeXT era of Steve Job’s career fascinates me.
I was and still am fascinated by how modern it is, despite most of the concepts dating back to like 1990. I expected GNUStep to be a window into the early days of software development. What I found is that it’s just as vital and usable as ever and that I just straight up prefer it to other—much newer—frameworks. It’s just awesome. The OOP approach in ObjC is just right. It doesn’t bludgeon your over the head like Java or C#. And if there’s some additional functionality you need, you can go grab any C library and just use it. I’m not sure what this concept is called, but I love how e.g. NSTableViewDataSource works. The API just asks you, “what does the cell at col X and row Y look like?” So much better than other implementations. I was writing an Android app in Java several years ago and I was so appalled by their list view that I wrote a Cocoa-inspired list data source class. Sent from my iPhone > On Dec 23, 2021, at 8:12 AM, H. Nikolaus Schaller <h...@goldelico.com> wrote: > > > >> Am 23.12.2021 um 14:44 schrieb Gustavo Tavares <gustavotava...@mac.com>: >> >> What do I love most about Cocoa? > > [note: here I read "Cocoa" more precisely as "Objective-C + > Base/GUI-Frameworks". There was a JAVA binding for Apple Cocoa long time ago > which I did not love equally well.] > >> You can actually read your code 6 months laters. > > Not only that. You can easily read code written by someone else 60 or even > more months later. > > I randomly picked some 5 years old code from github: > https://github.com/nicklockwood/iCarousel/blob/master/iCarousel/iCarousel.m > >> The parameters are labeled appropriately—and many `selectors` are English >> phrases. > > exactly. > >> Concepts are more important than saving a character here and there. > > I agree that I don't like the abbreviationism of some other languages which > has the wrong focus of saving characters during typing... > >> I would go as far as to say that Cocoa is the most readable API of all. > > And if you avoid the . notation for calling methods it is even more readable. > Brad Cox: everything in [ ] is a method call - except for C arrays. If you > avoid . method calls even the opposite holds true. > > In my experience the savings by @synthesisze for building getters/setters > automatically saves only some minutes during coding. Where coding is just a > small fraction of total project time. Most is debugging and refactoring code. > Then it is important that the code is readable without deciphering symbolic > operators. > >> >> So...what do you love about Cocoa? > > > See above :) > > BR, > Nikolaus