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Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, and early object-oriented programming (2016)

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107 points wmlive | 5 comments | 12 Nov 24 01:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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itslennysfault ◴[13 Nov 24 19:50 UTC] No.42129253[source]▶
So, this is why the abomination that is Obj-C is/was used for iPhone/Mac apps. I can't overstate how much I hate Obj-C. I'm so sooo happy Swift has pretty much entirely taken over.

Side note... I feel similarly about the Java to Kotlin transition. Sooo much better. Although, I don't hate Java NEARLY as much as Obj-C.

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ramesh31 ◴[13 Nov 24 19:59 UTC] No.42129327[source]▶
To each their own. I'm convinced it's just a visceral reaction to the square bracket syntax. Obj-C remains my favorite language of all time (although I haven't written it in years). Having a high level language that allows you to seamlessly drop into C felt like magic.
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1. cxr ◴[13 Nov 24 21:49 UTC] No.42130417[source]▶
Someone really ought to do an alternative "skin" for Objective-C. That is, define some reversible transformation that can be applied to any Objective-C program that only changes the surface-level details but otherwise results in mapping the exact same program into the later stages of the compiler (and the section of programmers' mental pipeline that comes after the part where their eyeballs and sense of taste are concerned). It's important that the reversible part be adhered to.

It's really kind of a bummer that we don't have well-known examples of "skinnable" programming languages already. The closest we get are the ones that let you choose your set of keywords for different locales in case you don't want to work with an English-based PL and those block based languages that let you manipulate them as blocks or edit the textual form. I firmly believe that PL skinning would really benefit so many otherwise worthwhile languages that get short-shrift because of negative reactions to the surface-level details. I'm referring in particular languages like those in the Pascal family. (You could also conceive of e.g. a skin for Golang that doesn't have leading caps be the determiner for whether a function is public or not. There are lots of applications for this, and the variations are a non-issue when you have an ecosystem with strong norms about applying a code formatter (like gofmt), which can dictate the format of the canonical on-disk representation.)

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2. Aeglaecia ◴[13 Nov 24 22:14 UTC] No.42130711[source]▶
surely after 20 years this already exists , someone posted a header the other day that makes c syntax python like , macros are enough to accomplish what youre describing? i dont perceive it as efficient to force codebase contributors to relearn their ingrained language syntax , possibly more efficient for those having newly learned a language tho ...
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3. mpweiher ◴[13 Nov 24 22:34 UTC] No.42130941[source]▶
The Four Stages of Objective-Smalltalk

https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/12/the-4-stages-of-objectiv...

Its first two stages are just that, but it has moved beyond, for good reasons.

4. cxr ◴[14 Nov 24 04:18 UTC] No.42133127[source]▶
> i dont perceive it as efficient to force codebase contributors to relearn their ingrained language syntax

That's why it's important that the transformation be reversible and what the gofmt-like code formatters are for.

5. lukeh ◴[15 Nov 24 10:14 UTC] No.42145509[source]▶
Apple did implement this around the Mac OS X transition (I guess, probably Steve Naroff did it?) but it was not pursued, in favor Java bindings (which funnily enough are back in fashion with swift-java).