.::output >> /dev/null::. : Making Objective-C Land More Habitable

Comment on Making Objective-C Land More Habitable by nicerobot

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:12:23 -0800

It's funny that Java's problem is too many libraries. There's so much variety, it can be daunting. But there are lots of great things happen around and with Java lately, after what seemed like a long period of stagnation. If you haven't checked out Scala, do. I like Scala better than all your favorites (but that's a good list). It's currently at the top of my list of favorite languages.

Comment on Making Objective-C Land More Habitable by Nick Chen

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:27:57 -0800

Yes, sometimes having too many choices is indeed daunting - that happened when I needed to pick a XML parser library for Java: so many choices, so many different metrics, which actually matter?

Scala is actually on my list. I just forgot to update my sidebar ;-) I like its ideas but (and maybe because I haven't used it enough yet) sometimes its various syntactic sugar constructs seem to be a handful - so many rules to remember.

Minimal syntax is one reason why I like Smalltalk - http://esug.heeg.de/whyusesmalltalktoteachoop/smalltalksyntaxonapostcard/

Comment on Making Objective-C Land More Habitable by nicerobot

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 21:34:51 -0800

Yea, the Smalltalk language is quite elegant. The environment is my only problem with it. You must have tied Io then? http://iolanguage.com/ May be my favorite non-JVM-based language (i do too much JVM-based coding so they're more important to me currently). It's really too bad Io is not more widely used.

Comment on Making Objective-C Land More Habitable by Handy Fuller

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 05:06:31 -0800

I love the minimal syntax of Smalltalk. It was a shock for me when I discovered it. I think it is the main reason why I prefer Smalltalk over other dynamic languages such as Ruby. I'm glad that F-Script provide a Smalltalk REPL for Cocoa, and it has a very useful object browser too. This is very different from the classic Smalltalk object browser, as F-Script's one is for exploring actual object graphs and sending messages to objects.

Comment on Making Objective-C Land More Habitable by Nick Chen

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:32:59 -0800

@nicerobot: Thanks. I'll have to check out IO. The nice thing about polyglot programming on the JVM is the ability to easily use existing java libraries. I think that's a nice advantage.

@Handy: There actually is a "real" Object Browser for Visualworks (vs. the normal class browser) in one of the contributed parcels (http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/buck/blogView?showComments=true&printTitle=Smalltalk_demo_video&entry=3385582893). It even displays the relations between objects graphically.