Re: ANN: One Step to GNUstep - pre-release version 0.9

[Ivan Vučica]

You have missed the fact that I was talking about GUI development novices. I 
want to gently nudge them into creating GUI applications.

On 13. lip. 2011., at 17:15, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> ObjC 2 certainly doesn't avoid  needing the concept of getter and setter 
> methods ... if you want to give people a gentle introductions to ObjC you can 
> leave out setter and getter methods anyway (not that they really add 
> complexity). A good introduction to object oriented programming would 
> discourage the idea of properties/instance-variables and encourage thinking 
> about what objects *do* anyway.

Problem is, AppKit, as well as other environments, use properties, getter and 
setter methods to adjust various aspects of an objects... well... properties.

I do want to push them to Objective-C, Foundation and AppKit, because my 
personal tastes are leaning in that direction a lot. That does not mean I can 
ignore the fact that these are still kids, and that seeing results is more 
important to them than how they are achieved. If they get to see a good way of 
achieving those results, better for them. They are not relatively patient 
adults that can easily be kept around while their teacher talks about highly 
abstract concepts.

My stated goal is not about teaching them OOP.

> It also has nothing to do with reference counting ... thats a completely 
> different issue (do you use reference counting or garbage collection), and if 
> you want to use GC then it's been around for traditional ObjC a lot longer 
> than ObjC2 (where it's currently in the process of being added in svn trunk 
> by David).


If they need to write getters and setters manually, they need to know about 
retain/release. 

I personally cannot stomach automatic garbage collection. If GC implementation 
as well as the program that's using GC is not impeccably done, problems are 
waiting around every corner. 

For a while, I worked on some quite big Python codebases that integrated with a 
3D engine written in C++. Interface between Python and C++ was 
semi-automatically generated as a part of the Python-Ogre project (Python-Ogre 
being a quite astonishing project, by the way). A lot of code in our projects 
was not written by me, and from start we were sort of sloppy. You can imagine 
what happened when you have a completely dynamic, garbage-collected language 
combined with sloppy code that interfaces with complex C++ code through a 
complex bridge.

Scars will probably stay for years to come.


Everything I'm talking about is primarily about my ideas on how I would 
approach teaching children development with GUI. Microsoft's offerings are 
quite simpler for my purposes, but again, my tastes are such that I can't quite 
stomach them, at least not at this point in my life. I would pretty much prefer 
teaching the kids with a free software technology, in a language that is much 
closer to the roots - the roots being C.

Objective-C is great. 
Objective-C 2.0 would be even better.

--
Ivan Vučica
ivan@vucica.net - http://ivan.vucica.net/