Comment by probablycorey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by probablycorey | Hacker News Reader

He is at the first stage of Cocoa development. Learning a new language is fun, and you can create some really cool stuff with the Cocoa frameworks. But once that wears off you are left with Objective-C, a vestigial language that isn't suited for a majority of application development.

Here are some reasons I think Objective-C needs to be retired:

- Header Files: These are archaic and require you to repeat code unnecessarily. Compiler's shouldn't require humans to do something that computers are better at.

- No Automatic Garbage Collection: In ObjC 2.0 we have this, but not on the iPhone. Unless you are making a high performance game, there is no reason the phone can't handle Automatic GC.

- No NSDictionary/NSArray literals: [[NSDictionary alloc] initWithObjectsAndKeys:@"value", @"key", @"value2", @"key2", nil]; // Enough said

- No regex: You kind of get regex's in 3.2+, but they are very limited and require around 3-4 lines of setup to get anything done.

- Xcode: You are pretty much required to use Xcode and I don't like Xcode. Even if you use the "xcodebuild" CLI, you still have to create the project through Xcode.

- Closures: I guess we will be able to use these soon, but it is going to take awhile for all the API's to get updated to accommodate them.

- No dynamic variables: It's handy to be able to shove data into objects sometimes. It's a hack, but as long as you treat it as such you can save a lot of needless code. (You can do this via the ObjC runtime, but it's messy)

- Unit Testing: It barely exists and is difficult to use.

- No namespacing: ObjC handles namespaces by prefixing class names. Blah, that is so 1978.

Am I the only person in the world who happened to like header files? It's a nice tool (for me) to separate interface declaration from modules/classes, so it's much easier to navigate massive codebases without the help from IDE.

Seriously, how would you get a list of all functions in a module without an IDE? Besides, I put all my documentation into h-files as well, so other devs can pretty much see what I am doing without ever glancing at c-files.

With Ruby or Java you need some advanced folding support in your editor or a full-fledged IDE.

No I'm with you re: header files.

These "people" don't also seem to get when you distribute a lib, you need to distribute headers with them.

Compared to other C-supersets, it's not the worst thing ever, but yeah I totally agree with you that Obj-C is painful compared to many newer languages. So glad that MacRuby is pretty much usable now.

I just wish I could use it for iPhone development. :)

Out of C, C++ and Objective-C, I'll take objective C any day.

Array literals: This one bugged me too. Try this:

  #define NSDICT(...) [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys: __VA_ARGS__, nil]

  #define NSARRAY(...) [NSArray arrayWithObjects: __VA_ARGS__, nil]

> a vestigial language that isn't suited for a majority of application development.

But good enough to write major parts of an operating system in by a company full of people easily smarter than you? Say what?

> Header Files

It's C for chrissakes.

> No GC on the iPhone

Because it's a performance penalty. Clock cycles on a phone are vastly more important than on a desktop/laptop. I can guarantee you this will change in a few years.

> No NSDictionary/NSArray literals

It's not a scripting language. Show me array literals in C or C++ that map to an underlying collection class that gives you fast enumeration and then we talk.

> Xcode

Personal preference.

> Closures

They're called Blocks.

> No dymanic variables

It's called 'id'.

    id whatever = [[YourObject alloc] init];

But even better:

     id whatever = [[NSClassFromString(@"YourClass") alloc] init];

Or how about setting properties on objects dynamically?

     [yourinstance setValue:@"Hello" forKey:@"property"];

Or dynamically dispatching methods?

Ever messed with vtables in C++?

> Unit Testing

Agree, but that's changing.

> No namespacing

You bitch about all the typing, but you want to type out namespaces instead of using a prefix on your classnames. Ok ...

Your confusing ObjC with Ruby, Python, et al. But it is not any of those. Like I mentioned elsewhere, it's a high level layer on a low level language. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

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