Comments for kuwamoto.org

Comment on Objective C, readability, and language design by Sean Corfield

Sean Corfield — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:25:02 +0000

Objective-C is a great concept as a language but I agree that the bracket syntax is hard work. I’m not sure of the origins but maybe it took a signal from Smalltalk’s use of brackets for code blocks? (Smalltalk does not need brackets for message passing in general and is much, much easier to read because of it)

@JulesLt, as a former member of the ANSI C++ Standards Committee I’ll say that we worked very hard to allow all C programs to have equivalent meaning in C++ because we valued compatibility. We didn’t even drop support for implicit int until the ANSI C committee dropped it! However, one of the guiding principles for C++ was “as close to C as possible but no closer” and the strictness of the C++ type system meant there had to be some incompatibilities (as well as some syntactic clarifications, as I recall - it was a decade ago).

Comment on Objective C, readability, and language design by sho

sho — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:04:18 +0000

Felix: I’m learning Objective C for the only thing it’s really good for these days: writing Mac and iPhone applications.

Joshua/Jules: Totally agree about the positives of Objective C. I love how dynamic it is, although as far as I can tell, it is not much different than ActionScript 3 in its balance of dynamic/static typing.

I also love using categories. Being able to extend classes in this way (similar to C# 3.0 or Ruby).

Moke.e.boy: OMeta? Never heard of it. What does it do?

Comment on Objective C, readability, and language design by monk.e.boy

monk.e.boy — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:26:33 +0000

Jesus wept. That has turned me off ObjC forever ;-)

Us Python programmers are still asking for “c++” rather thatn “c += 1″ thank god it’s not as ugly as your example…

Wouldn’t OMeta solve all these problems? Mini, domain specific languages….

monk.e.boy

Comment on Objective C, readability, and language design by JulesLt

JulesLt — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:23:22 +0000

I can completely understand where obj-c is coming from - unlike C++ it is a strict, backwardly compatible, extension of C, with the object extensions influenced by Smalltalk (and as I’m sure you’ll have discovered, the OO implementation is far closer to dynamic languages than C++/Java).

But I’d agree with most of your criticisms - the long method names smack of an ‘IDE-only’ language (Interface Builder has been around almost as long as ObjC) - I can accept the point of view that the method names say exactly what they do, which is a big argument that experienced obj-c developers will use. I’m also a big fan of named parameters in calls, but . . . well your example says it all.

It’s a bit like comments and constants - the idea behind them is to increase code clarity, but I’ve seriously seen a programmer code constants for ONE,TWO,THREE, etc, all the way up to TEN, and reference the numbers by name, because they only understood ‘numbers should be constants’ not ‘well named constants add to code clarity’.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that for simple cases, as in the above, the shorter code is clearer, even without all the extra type information.

There was an attempt to modernise the syntax at one point, but it died, because existing developers didn’t embrace it, and any new developers only had old-style literature to refer to.

Personally - I have high hopes for increasing first-class support of other languages against the Cocoa runtime - i.e. Ruby / Python / Smalltalk / Nu / fscript. You’re still going to have the issues with the length of the Cocoa method names, but you get to work with an ‘OO only’ language rather than OO extensions.

Comment on Objective C, readability, and language design by Joshua Noble

Joshua Noble — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:58:15 +0000

I have to say, I think a lot of things about ObjC suck a bit, but I’d say the one thing I really like about it is the ease of dynamic typing and reflection. That’s about it though really, the attempt to mix OO features like get/set is ugly and very counter-intuitive. It feels like a lot of the libraries are quite nifty for building out UI objects and handling messaging and callbacks but the core language itself isn’t nearly as helpful when trying to do anything else, which might be an accidental design decision (i.e. “let’s focus on this to the exclusion of other things”).

Comment on Objective C, readability, and language design by felix

felix — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:19:37 +0000

yeah that does sound annoying. Which begs the question, why are you learning objective C?

Comment on Improved pluralizing in PHP, ActionScript, and RoR by Joel

Joel — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:26:31 +0000

Thanks for this! I got here via a couple hops away from Google (ended up here via Paul Osman’s blog post), and it’s exactly what I was looking for to de-pluralize my table names for my MySQL->PHP Class converter.

Comment on Ack! I’ve been blocked by Google! (and what to do about it) by Joan Garnet

Joan Garnet — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:40:29 +0000

Another extra step you can take is password protect your admin directory. So easy…
For spam control use the great spamkarma.
Cheers!

Comment on The San Francisco Chicken Emergency by Mark

Mark — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:57:14 +0000

I have intentions of getting chickens my self. I live in Portland and you are legally allowed to have 3 without a permit. Right now I’m growing an organic vegetable garden and the chics would make a nice addition.

Comment on Ack! I’ve been blocked by Google! (and what to do about it) by Ken

Ken — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:10:01 +0000

I had the same issue with a couple of my blogs hosted at blogspot. They told me I had site that were considered spam sites. I simply wrote the admins and they cleared it up or at least they took away the warning I had gotten.