Friday, November 6, 2009

Why not Objective-C?

Patrick Logan can't understand why projects use C++ rather than Ojective-C. Neither can I.

For the 95% (or more) of code that isn't performance sensitive, it gives you expressiveness very close to Smalltalk, and for the 5% or less that need high performance, it gets you the performance and predictability of C.

2 comments:

  1. Maybe because ObjC code is hard to read?
    If you show some ObjC code to ten non-ObjC developers, what will be their first reaction? =:O

    "Code is read much more often than it is written" - and this is really important in commercial projects.

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  2. Totally agreed, code is read much more often than it is read, which is why (a) keyword selectors and (b) verbose, meaningful message names are so important.

    This is why:

    [a setObject:@"foo" forKey:@"bar"];

    is preferable over:

    a.put( "foo" , "bar" );

    Without having memorized the API, tell me which is the key and which is the value in the Java version? Now multiply this effect over a large code base.

    Of course, the Smalltalk version is somewhat nicer still

    a setObject:'foo' forKey:'bar'.

    This keeps the readable keyword syntax and ditches more of the syntactic noise.

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