[objc retain];
On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Howard <hls...@gmail.com> wrote: > It's been a rough week ... I still had my sore throat (noticeable > during the webinar) when I arrived to do four days of accelerated > Tapestry training in Michigan. Returning after midnight on Friday, I > had morning and afternoon slots at Portland Code Camp on Saturday to > talk about Clojure and Tapestry. I think it was a good little > conference, and 75 minute time slots are just barely enough time to say > something meaningful. > I attended a nice introduction to jQuery (once again confirming that I > backed the wrong horse when selecting Prototype over jQuery for > Tapestry), and another session on coding for iPhone. > The only other session I attended was iPhone Development from an ex > Softie by Rory Blyth. It was entertaining in an unusual way, since Rory > is very glib in a stream of consciousness kind of way, but he spent all > but five minutes of his time ranting against Objective-C and iPhone > toolkits. Literally he had five minutes for the core of his talk! > I was one of a few people in the audience who knew Objective-C (though > it's more than ten years since I coded in it) and found many of his > objections quite unreasonable. Basically, he wants Objective-C to look > like every other language derived from C, which is missing the point of > what Objective-C actually is: a melding of concepts from C and > Smalltalk designed to operate on the very constrained hardware > available, even for desktops, in the late 80's. It obligates developers > to do something unreasonable by today's standards (a cumbersome retain > count mechanism, rather than garbage collection), and the (optional) > type syntax (such as (NSString *)) reveals its C heritage (as Smalltalk > doesn't deal with declared types). > I even made this point to him; that Objective-C may be a natural fit > for the constrained devices such as mobile platforms. His response to > any challenge from any audience member was that we were afflicted > with "Stockholm syndrome". > Strangely, a few minutes after I pointed out the "constrained device" > theory (which he dismissed, disjointedly citing Windows smart phones as > a "success") he then talked about ... the constraints of the iPhone in > terms of memory, battery and CPU utilization. > Basically, Rory is unable to wrap his head around anything unfamiliar > or to understand how a difference in philosophy can inform how a > language syntax evolves, as well as the terminology (i.e., > Objective-C's "receivers", "messages" and "selectors") used to describe > that language. > There's a quote from the book Freakonomics, roughly (from memory): > Morality is how we think we should live our lives. Economics reveals > how we actually do. > Rory has a kind of "language morality" that states the objects should > be listed first, with periods separating member access, such as method > invocation, and that languages that deviate from this are failed and > broken. Unfortunately for that argument, the explosive success of the > iPhone and the iPhone app market indicates that Objective-C is a > tremendous development platform for the kind of intuitive, focused, > responsive applications that dominate the market. > It was a shame, because his style was entertaining, if very "slacker" > styled, and if he organized his thoughts a bit and kept track of the > clock, his valid criticisms of the iPhone development environment would > hold a bit more weight and reach a wider, more receptive audience. > > -- > Posted By Howard to Tapestry Central at 5/31/2009 12:22:00 PM --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tapestry.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tapestry.apache.org
