Thoughts on ObjectiveC and Cocoa

I wanted to collect my initial impressions of ObjectiveC and Cocoa. I’ve started reading the Hillegas book again after and interrupted start last year with the goal of doing a lot more osx coding in the future.

The things I’m enjoying most about the language are:

• the message passing nature of the method calls. It just seems like the right thing to do especially after experiencing Erlang and Ruby which both feature message passing.
• the Cocoa APIs are beautifully self documenting and often read like pseudo code.
• the fantastic use of Design Patterns within Cocoa, you can really see the benefits I using things like Delegates after spending some time doing ObjC.

The downsides so far are limited to manual memory management within ObjC. Granted there is a garbage collector on OSX but not on iPhones etc, so the common wisdom seems to be you need to know how to use both. I don’t see this will be an insurmountable problem as I managed to learn it for C++ which was a much larger language.

The Hillegas book I’m using is brilliant but what would you expect from a guy that has run training course on the subject for so long. The book does feel like running through a training course but one run by a guy genuinely exciting about the subject. My only wish is that there was an equivalent for the iPhone / iPad.