Ars has just published part three in their series "From Win32 to Cocoa", in which Peter Bright explains why he thinks "Windows is dying, Windows applications suck, and Microsoft is too blinkered to fix any of it." Part one dealt with the history of both development platforms, part two dived into .Net, different types of programmers, and Windows Vista, and part three details the development platform and tools Apple has to offer, and in what ways they are superior or inferior to Windows'.
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Member since:2007-04-18
The problem here is that you are putting Objective-C/Cocoa into the same league in terms of programming complexity as C/C++, whereas in reality it is much more similar to Java/C#. 99% of the time you don't really have to deal with pointers (one can regard 'ClassName *var;' as syntax sugar, so that doesn't really qualify as pointer manipulation) and Objective-C's strong dynamic mechanisms work very well for GUI environments, which are by nature hard to describe flexibly using static typing. This is further emphasized in ObjC-2.0 which features an automatic GC.
As the author pointed out, no single feature of Objective-C or Cocoa really put them above other players. It's much more about the combination and implementation of these features. Also, one can transition programming styles from dynamic RAD with good code manageability all the way down to assembly-level programming without having to switch languages.
Member since:2005-07-07
Yet MS has poured loads of development hours into .NET, designing Winforms and then abandoning it in favor of WPF. All this while, MFC has not dramatically changed since its inception about 15 years ago and WTL is not officially supported. I think the message from Redmond is pretty clear.
C++ developers, sod off.
Member since:2006-01-06
Nonsense. VS 2008 updated MFC.
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Pat-Brenner-New-Updates-to-M...
Member since:
2006-01-06
I think you kind of missed my point. Most app developers don't write the kinds of apps that would require C/C++. Your average corporate or small-business developer doesn't need the horsepower or complexity offered by C/C++; so, .NET and Java applications really work well in those environments. In my company, for example, our support devs write data collection apps in C#. Most of the data goes to payroll/accounting or HR. More and more of those apps are moving from client machines up to web servers. But web applications aren't always possible/useful to all users; for example, the sales folks who are on the road all the time need apps which do projections for them, keep track of expenses, and other stuff. They don't want to VPN into the corporate network to do all of those things, so client apps work for them. The devs who are writing these apps are using C# because C/C++ would be overkill for what they need. The apps are corporate, highly targeted at specific scenarios, and relatively simple. That, really, is what most devs do in the real world. They aren't writing Internet Explorer or KDE or whatever. For THOSE guys, yeah, sure, I'll grant you, C/C++ is the better tool. But those guys only represent a thimbleful of the larger market for developers. All that you have to do is crack open the classified ads and see what sorts of jobs people are looking for. It's a common theme: Java, .NET, databases, web development. You won't see many jobs for C/C++ developers, on average, compared to the others, and I think that is reflected in Microsoft's emphasis on managed code.