[Pythonmac-SIG] Objective C and Cocoa

[Bob Ippolito]

On Wednesday, Oct 15, 2003, at 14:20 America/New_York, Daniel Lord 
wrote:

> 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.

GNUStep makes your rant pretty worthless.  The are outstanding issues 
though:
	PyObjC doesn't support GNUStep yet (needs a volunteer or some of 
Ronald's time)
	Cocoa nib files are not directly portable to GNUStep (and vice versa, 
I guess, I think there's go-between tools though)		- Renaissance which 
lets you do interfaces in XML and works on both GNUStep and Cocoa (I 
have used it, it works), but you can't use Apple's nice tool
	GNUStep isn't so hot on win32 yet

Honestly, I don't care if it's a closed source single platform 
framework.  What I care about is getting stuff done as elegantly and 
effortlessly as possible on the platform of my choice.  Kludge sucks.  
But in any case, there's GNUStep, so in theory in the near future (as 
near as we, the open source community, make it) all this stuff would 
work on Linux and (with some work on the win32 port of GNUStep) win32.

As far as your 'F' goes for .NET, that's unfair too -- there's Mono, 
and the Rotor project (Microsoft's Shared Source .NET implementation, I 
don't believe it has the GUI stuff though).  Mono works on linux/x86 
and can probably be hacked to work on OS X/ppc, though they don't 
officially support it (yet).  Rotor works on FreeBSD, win32, OS X and 
can probably be hacked to work on Linux.

-bob