[Pyobjc-dev] Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] pyobjc / cocoa

[tmk]

On Thursday, Oct 17, 2002, at 00:32 Europe/Brussels, Jack Jansen wrote:

>
> On woensdag, oktober 16, 2002, at 05:34 , bbum@mac.com wrote:
>> We have been down this path a number of times over the six year 
>> history of the PyObjC module.  In all cases, we have ended up back 
>> with the naming conventions that we have now for a number of reasons. 
>>   Moving from double underbar to single underbar was definitely a win 
>> -- made the code easier to read and write.
>
> I'm not convinced yet, but you're getting there:-)
>
> You're getting there because you have by far the most experience with 
> this beast, so if you say the _ convention is A Good Thing and 
> everything else leads to madness: okay, proof by authority:-) Also, 
> the point of ObjC-Cocoa programmers moving to Python is a valid one.

Yes on both counts. That's exactly what encouraged to actually try and 
write some code using the alternative syntax. And indeed, soon enough 
it so happens that the "_" notation just "grew" on me and became quite 
natural. I think it's because it "reads" effortlessly, whereas I needed 
to pause and decipher the innercased notation.

> I'm not convinced yet, though, because I think it depends on the 
> target audience. My first impression when I saw PyObjC code (about 18 
> months ago) was "UGLY!! UGLY!! UGLY!!", and I immediately stayed away 
> from it for a year. And

Funny. Same here. But that was the notation with the double underscore 
(if memory serves I even de-lurked at that time just to say that I felt 
the syntax looked really UGLY ;-). But with one underscore, as said 
previously, it makes a lot of sense to me (much more than the 
alternatives anyway).

One other thing, A paradox, I tend to dislike using underscores when I 
write "regular" python code. I prefer using InnerCased (?) style. Funny 
brain.

>  I've heard of more people with this reaction. So, if we care about 
> winning existing Python programmers over to Cocoa (which I think we 
> should: even though Carbon is going to be around for a long time it'll 
> only be interesting to existing Mac programmers, and Cocoa has the 
> potential to win over unix and windows Python people) we should make 
> sure it looks appealing.
> Let's try for a political solution. The official mapping is the _ 
> mapping. However, for convenience there are some method names that 
> have an alias. This alias is translated early on (when looking up the 
> method name from Python, or when creating the Python subclass of an 
> ObjC class), and the official name is used from then on. Would this be 
> workable?

Looks like a reasonable compromise. But I suspect (based on my humble 
experience) that most people will eventually use the "_" naturally 
(same as C programmers who first don't want to learn ObjC and then fall 
in love with it ;-)

= tmk =

> --
> - Jack Jansen        <Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com>        
> http://www.cwi.nl/~jack -
> - If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma 
> Goldman -
>
>
>
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