Re: People think we are for nostalgics or dead.

[Daniel Boyd]

It’s funny. I originally got into GNUStep because I’m a history buff and the 
NeXT era of Steve Job’s career fascinates me. 

I was and still am fascinated by how modern it is, despite most of the concepts 
dating back to like 1990. I expected GNUStep to be a window into the early days 
of software development. What I found is that it’s just as vital and usable as 
ever and that I just straight up prefer it to other—much newer—frameworks. It’s 
just awesome. 

The OOP approach in ObjC is just right. It doesn’t bludgeon your over the head 
like Java or C#. And if there’s some additional functionality you need, you can 
go grab any C library and just use it. 

I’m not sure what this concept is called, but I love how e.g. 
NSTableViewDataSource works. The API just asks you, “what does the cell at col 
X and row Y look like?” So much better than other implementations. I was 
writing an Android app in Java several years ago and I was so appalled by their 
list view that I wrote a Cocoa-inspired list data source class. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Dec 23, 2021, at 8:12 AM, H. Nikolaus Schaller <hns@goldelico.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> Am 23.12.2021 um 14:44 schrieb Gustavo Tavares <gustavotavares@mac.com>:
>> 
>> What do I love most about Cocoa?
> 
> [note: here I read "Cocoa" more precisely as "Objective-C + 
> Base/GUI-Frameworks". There was a JAVA binding for Apple Cocoa long time ago 
> which I did not love equally well.]
> 
>> You can actually read your code 6 months laters.
> 
> Not only that. You can easily read code written by someone else 60 or even 
> more months later.
> 
> I randomly picked some 5 years old code from github: 
> https://github.com/nicklockwood/iCarousel/blob/master/iCarousel/iCarousel.m
> 
>> The parameters are labeled appropriately—and many `selectors` are English 
>> phrases.
> 
> exactly.
> 
>> Concepts are more important than saving a character here and there.
> 
> I agree that I don't like the abbreviationism of some other languages which 
> has the wrong focus of saving characters during typing...
> 
>> I would go as far as to say that Cocoa is the most readable API of all.
> 
> And if you avoid the . notation for calling methods it is even more readable. 
> Brad Cox: everything in [ ] is a method call - except for C arrays. If you 
> avoid . method calls even the opposite holds true.
> 
> In my experience the savings by @synthesisze for building getters/setters 
> automatically saves only some minutes during coding. Where coding is just a 
> small fraction of total project time. Most is debugging and refactoring code. 
> Then it is important that the code is readable without deciphering symbolic 
> operators.
> 
>> 
>> So...what do you love about Cocoa?
> 
> 
> See above :)
> 
> BR,
> Nikolaus