Complementary language?

[Alex Martelli]

Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:

> aleaxit at yahoo.com (Alex Martelli) writes:
> 
> > Objective-C is cool... on the Mac; I'm not sure how well-supported it is
> > elsewhere, though.  In addition to C's advantages, it would let you make
> > Cocoa GUIs on the Mac easily (with PyObjC &c).  But then, the right way
> > to study Obj-C from scratch is no doubt to start with C, anyway.
> 
> Objective-C is part of the Gnu Compiler Collection. As such, it's
> probably easy to find a working compiler. But I agree - you probably
> want to start with C.

BTW, I wouldn't give the same advice re C++ -- if C++ is what you want
to know you're probably better off studying C++ itself.  But ObjC is
neatly partitioned into two sublanguages... C plus a smalltalk-like OO
part... and it seems to me that this makes C the natural starting point.


> As an aside, if you want to study Eiffel, the book to buy is _Object
> Oriented Software Construction_, second edition, by Bertrand
> Meyer. Everybody doing OO software should read this book, as the
> lessons about constructing inheritance hierarchies are invaluable,
> even if the language won't enforce them for you.

Even though I'm not enthusiastic about Eiffel per se, I can second the
recommendation about Meyer's book; it's interesting and instructive as
one very thorough and well-developed vision of OOP.


Alex