With all due respect, and with definite agreement on your points about
language evolution, etc., nevertheless, Obejctive-C got some things
right that we tried to get into Java but were routinely ignored at
sun, and it took several decades to get going in other languages.
Objective-C contains elements of AOP, has a garbage-collector (not on
iPhone, but that's a mobile-ism, and not uncommon in constrained
environments), etc.
In other words, your specific points have merit, but the truth is,
you're over-stating it. Objective-C 2.x is a reasonably recent
language, with lots of modern features, and has one of the cleanest
class libraries and best UI libraries I've seen with a strong paradigm
for development (draw your gui, link them with associations in a
really healthy MVC approach, yadda yadda).
I'm not arguing for Apple's strong-man tactics here... I'm just
saying, language bashing isn't really the point, nor does it help the
argument. If I had the choice of programming in Objective-C everyday
or just about any other language, I'd choose Objective-C... you get
the power to hyper-optimize and do powerful things "low to the ground"
but by default you're doing really healthy O-O.
And I speak as someone working on another language in my spare time -
I long to get some of what I had in Objective-C into something like
Java. I wrote so much less code for the same functionality in the
former language. <sigh>
Christian.
On Apr 12, 2010, at 12:30 AM, RogerV wrote:
It's rather depressing to know that starting with iPhone OS 4 that in
order to program apps for iphone/itouch/ipad, one has to step
backwards to a weird hybrid variant of C language that is a two decade
old anachronism. The one virtue of Objective-C is that it's actually a
better OOP language than C++. Yet in the end it's C with its raw
address pointers -- and to boot, reference counted memory objects
(ugh!)
For decades it's been an axiom that innovation in software development
takes place in the languages and tools every bit as much as in the
applications that get developed. Now Apple is forbidding that manner
of creativity. Yes, they made some tweaks to Objective-C with 2.0, but
much of that was not really that earth shaking - and some features,
like garbage collected memory, are not available on the mobile
devices.
This has been a great era for new computer languages and ideas coming
to surface, yet for the Apple mobi
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