Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Objective-C and Cocoa : enticing

...Smalltalk VM running on the iPhone in 93 days... sweet effort!... wonder what others will follow for other languages...
http://news.squeak.org/2008/06/11/squeak-on-the-iphone/

It turns out, the more I look into it... Objective-C seems really cool, and enticing. ObjC is a series of SmallTalk style object extensions to the C language. It's dynamically typed like SmallTalk (and Ruby). There is lots of message passing (also like Ruby). Even though ObjC is dynamically typed, and has message passing and all that other great goodness... it's compiled. It's a dynamically typed language, but variables are only typed by choice. Also, many of tedious aspects of Objective-C — memory management and accessor maintenance, for example — go away in Leopard if you want them to.

RubyCocoa is also available, which is bridge between Ruby and Objective-C, and vice versa. You can write full on Cocoa apps in Ruby. ...however, Mac development (same goes for iPhone) seems to revolve around Cocoa.. and Cocoa revolves around ObjC. The two are designed to work together.

Nothing will compare to the Ruby syntax, but ObjC is becoming more attractive to me. Espeically with iPhone app ideas for the iPhone bouncing around in my head daily.

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