David Chisnall takes a look behind the scenes at Apple's upcoming revamp of the Objective-C language. As with any new language, some things are good, some are ugly, and some are both.
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Member since:2005-07-16
The primary basis of SmallTalk as an object oriented system is that every "thing" is an object.
Objective-C fails rather completely as a proper object oriented system on that basic criteria.
Academically, yes, I would agree with you. Objective-C is a compromise language: it's not as beautiful or clean as Smalltalk, but it lets you work properly with existing C code, is dynamic, and fairly fast (and can be as fast as needed by using C methods/caching imp). Certainly it's a very useful language. Beside, one of the great thing with Objective-C is, strangely enough, the OpenStep framework (Cocoa or GNUstep). Between developing a gui application in Smalltalk and in Objective-C, I will take Objective-C + OpenStep every day, even if, as a language, I prefer Smalltalk. But my point is, while Objective-C is not as nice as Smalltalk, it's the next best thing if you want to use C.
It grafts the less important aspects of object-orientation onto C without making the language an object oriented language. (C++ has the same failing as an OO language.)
Less important aspects ??? To the contrary, it embodies all the important ones :-) -- particularly, it considers objects as "living entities" sending/receiving messages. To me, it's much more important to have a dynamic language with introspection/reflexion than having everything as objects. Don't get me wrong -- I agree with you, having everything as objects is wonderful, and extremely handy (and actually impact the introspection capacities, of course). But I'm very happy with the compromise Objective-C reached.
Edited 2006-11-06 19:53
Member since:2006-03-08
The primary basis of SmallTalk as an object oriented system is that every "thing" is an object.
I understand that you'd prefer a complete "everything is an object" language but please tell me one thing...
- How can a superset of C (an ESSENTIAL aspect of ObjC) could treat everything as an object ?
Member since:2006-02-15
The primary basis of SmallTalk as an object oriented system is that every "thing" is an object.
I understand that you'd prefer a complete "everything is an object" language but please tell me one thing...
- How can a superset of C (an ESSENTIAL aspect of ObjC) could treat everything as an object ?
It can't, which is why Objective-C can't really be described as derived from SmallTalk.
Member since:
2006-02-15
Objective-C is the simplest modification of C to add _proper_ object orientation, modelled after the Smalltalk paradigm. Much, much better than C++ ;-) and extremely far from "a bad idea", to the contrary.
I argued with Brad about this at the time and no one has convinced me differently since: The primary basis of SmallTalk as an object oriented system is that every "thing" is an object.
Objective-C fails rather completely as a proper object oriented system on that basic criteria.
It grafts the less important aspects of object-orientation onto C without making the language an object oriented language. (C++ has the same failing as an OO language.)