True, I'm amazed at how incredibly productive Objective C programmers are. I'm just starting in Objective C myself, after twenty years of C and Pascal, so I still have to do a lot of reading to get things to work right, but already there are some tasks that I can't believe I ever had to do the hard way. In particular, there are some tasks that took a lot of code in C, like supporting multiple levels of undo, managing documents and files IO, manipulating complex UI elements like tabbed views, custom UI elements, and on and on. Now some of those tasks are done in Interface Builder with little or no code, and what code there is can often be easily yanked from other projects.
Objective C is basically C with SmallTalk-like extensions. I'm blown away by the power and flexibility of both the language and the frameworks.
Microsoft developers, on the other hand, are stuck with C#, Microsoft's lame answer to Java, and MFC, which is basically the crusty old WIN32 APIs with C++ classes clumsily plastered on top.
EDIT: Of course, the holy grail of frameworks is to produce one that's cross-platform. Microsoft has claimed C# would do that, but they have no credibility there. They also claimed several other software development tools would be cross-platform, and either never shipped the Mac version or shipped it and then cancelled it. For example, consider Mac BASIC (never shipped, just announced so Apple would cancel its own BASIC), MFC for Mac (shipped and then cancelled after Symantec cancelled its Bedrock product), Visual BASIC for mac (shipped and cancelled), MS Help for Mac (shipped and cancelled), and so on.
Dave |
