

Objective C - "horrendously, absolutely awful" - brettm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/sep/16/ios-android-windows8-programming-choose?commentpage=2#start-of-comments

======
aaronbrethorst
I see you're new here. Thanks for submitting this, as it certainly is a
discussion-provoking piece (albeit a bit trollish). That said, please make
sure you that you don't link to the comments anchor, unless your intention is
for HN folk to read the article's comments. Given that the quote cited in your
title comes from the body of the article, I'm guessing this is not the case.

~~~
brettm
I am new and thanks, I now know what trolling means (I didn't mean it)! I
posted this article because I believe it may put people off from developing
with Objective C due to some misconceptions about the language i.e. no iOS
Garbage Collection doesn't mean that Apple are two generations behind Java or
.NET or because only 6.1% of developers use Objective C means its an awful
language to use.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
By no means am I suggesting that you're trolling, just that the original
article is a bit trollish. Don't let that dissuade you by any means, though :)
Welcome to HN!

------
makecheck
These kinds of baseless statements really bug me. Where to begin.

First, Objective-C is _not a big language_. For example, look up Pierre
Chatelier's guide [1] that maps from C++ concepts to Objective-C; there isn't
a heck of a lot to know. Objective-C really is a language that you could learn
pretty well in a couple of weekends. It's silly to suggest that professional
programmers couldn't possibly find the time to pick up this language just
because they're already firmly entrenched in the world of other languages. I'm
forced to wonder if the article's author has used Objective-C at all.

The article doesn't give a lot of specific gripes. The only stated "problem"
with Objective-C is its lack of garbage collection on iOS. Well it is widely
known that Objective-C's lack of garbage collection is a _benefit_ to iOS, not
a detriment, since iOS applications perform better. And Apple's new Automatic
Reference Counting scheme (ARC) is a stroke of genius: it "gives back" to
developers the simplified coding that garbage collection would have allowed,
but _without_ sacrificing performance the way garbage collection does. ARC
even avoids other problems, e.g. how to deal with retention of data across
framework boundaries.

As far as needing a Mac to do development, that is technically true (but only
for iOS; you could learn Objective-C using something like GNUstep and GCC on
Linux, say). A Mac mini is not exactly expensive and it works with existing
monitors and keyboards. There are also a lot of people already using Macs as
their laptops, even if they primarily run Windows or Linux on it.

[1] [http://chachatelier.fr/programmation/fichiers/cpp-objc-
en.pd...](http://chachatelier.fr/programmation/fichiers/cpp-objc-en.pdf)

