My worldview as it relates to the writing of software in Objective-C contains many items that are at odds with one another. I either need to resolve them or to live with the cognitive dissonance, gradually becoming more insane as the conflicting items hurl one another at my cortex.
Of the programming environments I’ve worked with, I believe that Objective-C and its frameworks are the most pleasant. On the other hand, I think that Objective-C was a hack, and that the frameworks are not without their design mistakes, regressions and inconsistencies.
I believe that Objective-C programmers are correct to side with Alan Kay in saying that the designers of C++ and Java missed out on the crucial part of object-oriented programming, which is message passing. However I also believe that ObjC missed out on a crucial part of object-oriented programming, which is the compiler as an object. Decades spent optimising the compile-link-debug-edit cycle have been spent on solving the wrong problem. On which topic, I feel conflicted by the fact that we’ve got this Smalltalk-like dynamic language support but can have our products canned for picking the same selector name as some internal secret stuff in someone else’s code.
I feel disappointed that in the last decade, we’ve just got tools that can do the same thing but in more places. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s Apple’s responsibility to break the world; their mission should be to make existing workflows faster, with new excitement being optional or third-party. It is both amazing and slightly saddening that if you defrosted a cryogenically-preserved NeXT application programmer, they would just need to learn reference counting, blocks and a little new syntax and style before they’d be up to speed with iOS apps (and maybe protocols, depending on when you threw them in the cooler).
Ah, yes, Apple. The problem with a single vendor driving the whole community around a language or other technology is that the successes or failures of the technology inevitably get caught up in the marketing messages of that vendor, and the values and attitudes ascribed to that vendor. The problem with a community-driven technology is that it can take you longer than the life of the Sun just to agree how lambdas should work. It’d be healthy for there to be other popular platforms for ObjC programming, except for the inconsistencies and conflicts that would produce. It’s great that GNUstep, Cocotron and Apportable exist and are as mature as they are, but “popular” is not quite the correct adjective for them.
Fundamentally I fear a world in which programmers think JavaScript is acceptable. Partly because JavaScript, but mostly because when a language is introduced and people avoid it for ages, then just because some CEO says all future websites must use it they start using it, that’s not healthy. Objective-C was introduced and people avoided it for ages, then just because some CEO said all future apps must use it they started using it.
I feel like I ought to do something about some of that. I haven’t, and perhaps that makes me the guy who comes up to a bunch of developers, says “I’ve got a great idea” and expects them to make it.
