Re: Objective-C (Possibly OT)

FROM : Greg Titus
DATE : Mon Jan 14 22:23:37 2002

On Monday, January 14, 2002, at 02:14 , Steve Klingsporn wrote:
> I'm not saying Objective-C isn't a superior language to C++;
> I'm sure it is, and have read over "Learning Cocoa" and played
> with some of the examples and what-not...  Doesn't matter if the
> skill is not a portable or relevant one, though.
>

I'm going to avoid the whole language war issue, but I must comment on
this part.

IMHO, breadth of experience and having multiple ways to look at a
problem is _the_ main differenciator between a good programmer and a
merely average one.

I don't care whether you'll ever have a job writing in Lisp - you ought
to learn the language and play with it for awhile. It's a very different
way of thinking about programming, and when you come upon a problem in
your work where that is the best approach, you'll know it, and you'll be
able to frame and solve the problem in the optimum way -- even if you
need to take a Lisp-ish approach in C++.

Ditto Prolog. Ditto Smalltalk. Objective-C is an interesting language
_because_ it is a demonstration of "thinking in Smalltalk" but writing
in (mostly) C.  Understanding the choices that Objective-C made and
common patterns of Obj-C will improve your C++ coding, I guarantee it.

Thus I would argue that there is no such thing as a non-portable or
irrelevant language skill. The ideas are portable to anywhere.

   --Greg