The iPhone SDK has started to make more sense. You just have to flow with how Apple wants you to code. The Cocoa Fundamentals Guide offers this pithy advice: “Instead of incorporating library code into your program, you incorporate your program code into the framework.”
So far, I get along ok with Objective-C thanks to a previous interest in Smalltalk (not that I’m fluent). Years ago, I stumbled onto the Smalltalk definitions for “Object” and “Class” while exploring in Squeak’s class hierarchy browser. I was struck by how the dynamic language defined Classes as class descriptions, classes as Class objects, Object for creating/counting all instances, and everything else as instantiable classes. Wow. I barely understood these old-school gems, but they hinted at a much simpler and more powerful way to add object orientation to a language. Anyways, I’m still no rocket scientist about this stuff, but NSObject hints at the same mechanisms from Smalltalk layered on top of C, which makes Objective-C easier to appreciate.
Many thanks to fellow Flashers for more tips and resources too!
Sweet blog. I never know what I am going to come across next. I think you should do more posting as you have some pretty intelligent stuff to say.
I’ll be watching you .