[Pythonmac-SIG] Objective C and Cocoa

[Daniel Lord]

After listening to an off topic discussion of ObjC for a few days, I 
have to weigh in with a point none have really covered.

Elegant? Yes. Labor-saving? Yes. But I still won't use them--ever. I 
don't use them and don't care about them any more than I care about 
Microsoft's single platform proprietary frameworks and languages. I 
reject all single platform solutions because I never know which 
platform I might want to run my code on and I am not even sure whether 
I'll continue with OSX or move to Linux in a couple of years. I realize 
this is personal preference and opinion, but I have read enough of that 
about ObjC lately in this forum to feel I can speak also. In my view, 
language idiosyncracies can always be worked around: every engineer has 
to compromise on tools and it is usually driven by the platform choice. 
The language rarely drives the paltform choice--it is the other way 
around. So arguing the merits of the languages ObjC and Python is, to 
my way of thinking, far less important than standards and ubiquity. 
Portability and reusability are paramount and ObjC and Cocoa get an F 
in that just like .NET. Python gets an A-plus and, despite disliking 
Tk, it is my language of choice and has little competition on the 
horizon at this time. I do wish Tk coudl be replaced by somethign 
better--but no good cross-platform GUI has come up yet.

I have no use for a tool, no matter how clever or powerful, if I cannot 
take it and the things I build with it with me. Apple should have done 
a better job in tool selection: in time ObjC and Cocoa will be 
marginalized and that will be a shame for Aqua and other great Apple 
developments.