Comments on: Learning a Thing or Two from Ruby

By: Blacktiger

Blacktiger — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 18:02:17 +0000

I thought up an interesting way to still use square brackets, but eliminate the need to go back to the beginning of a line a while back. Instead of [receiver message], you move the receiver out to reciever[message]. The nice thing about this is you can then chain messages together. receiver[message1][message2] would be equivalent to (receiver[message1])[message2].

By: Benjamin Stiglitz

Benjamin Stiglitz — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 00:21:26 +0000

What we need is a Ruby built on top of the Objective-C runtime. It’d have to limit language like singleton methods, but it’d still be a huge step.

By: RubyCocoa Shininess in Leopard

RubyCocoa Shininess in Leopard — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 22:52:28 +0000

[…] maybe Apple agrees with my sentiments after all. Check out /Developer/Examples/Ruby/RubyCocoa— there’s 40 examples there! […]

By: Andy Matuschak

Andy Matuschak — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:22:00 +0000

Agreed. Like Nu but not. Alternately, I really like Ruby. So maybe just make RubyCocoa better.

By: Jesper

Jesper — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 21:43:53 +0000

I should qualify my statement more:

“For Objective-C to be a greater language in terms of syntax, it’d also have to stop being Objective-C, in my opinion.”

That doesn’t mean that I can’t imagine a syntactically improved version of Objective-C. It means that Objective-C right now really is a superset of C, and that the same changes to it that would make it a better Objective-C would also make it a bastardized superset (like C++).

I think the better way to go would be to introduce an entirely new language, going hand in hand with Objective-C.

By: Andy Matuschak

Andy Matuschak — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:12:36 +0000

For Objective-C to be a greater language in terms of syntax, it’d also have to stop being Objective-C, in my opinion.

You’re right. I think Ahruman had it right when he said:

It’s a bit depressing how we all keep getting enthused over what are, really, common language features that have been around for ages. Basically, what we need is a high-level language that’s fully integrated into the Objective-C object model/runtime.

Even more awesome would be the ability to drop down into C when you need to for efficiency.

Thanks for the corrections, guys.

By: kontextbewusst* » Blog Archive » DAS wäre wirklich ein Grund zum Updaten…

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 11:51:26 +0000

[…] learning a thing or two from ruby Andy Matuschak, Square Signals […]

By: freno

freno — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 16:51:29 +0000

“Ruby doesn’t have a for loop.”

But you can do something like:

ruby -e ‘for x in 1..10; puts x end’

ruby -e ‘for x in 1..10 do puts x end’

(it’s used in http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/4700 , for example).

By: Ahruman

Ahruman — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 12:45:01 +0000

Your Objective-C dictionary example is broken. 4, 9 and 10 aren’t objects.

It’s a bit depressing how we all keep getting enthused over what are, really, common language features that have been around for ages. Basically, what we need is a high-level language that’s fully integrated into the Objective-C object model/runtime. For a while, Nu looked like it might be it, but no.

Oh, and there’s a missing ‘ in “params = {:action => ‘posts’, :controller => ‘blog,…”

By: Jesper

Jesper — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 11:22:46 +0000

Actually, from what I hear, one of the last things they shoehorned into 10.5 was IB knowing about Ruby Cocoa idioms and being able to tell and generate outlets and actions.

But you’re also right that it rocks on the whole though. :)

Apple’s right about not wanting to descend into C++. Making dictionary and array access simple would require either one-off compiler secret sauce (for ’special objects’, that’s bad - the syntax of for(x in y) and properties have all been *available*) or introduction of things like operator overloading (famously offered so thoroughly in C++ to the extent that you have to override the fucking assignment operator (=) when you want objects of your classes to be assignable).

For Objective-C to be a greater language in terms of syntax, it’d also have to stop being Objective-C, in my opinion. I don’t envy whoever’s in charge (bbum has said that he’s been responsible for Objective-C 2.0) because this is going to be tricky to sort out.