68% Hate Objective C

trisun

Did Apple Make A Mistake Choosing Objective-C For iPhone SDK?
One of my favourite sayings is a quote from Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz – different isn’t always better, but better’s always different. So, I’m a fan of a lot of the super-innovative work that Apple does.   However, their thinking is sometimes different to the point of not making any commercial sense.  The iPhone is a case in point.
For example, it took a long time for Apple to even realise that it needed to release an SDK for the iPhone.  What they were thinking, I have no idea,  given it’s a blindingly obvious requirement.  Surely everyone knows by now that “innovation happens elsewhere”.  Or, to put it another way, it was clear from the word go that Apple wouldn’t have the resources to develop every iPhone application people would want to use; witness the popularity of third-party apps on “jail-broken” iPhones.
Recently, Apple bowed to the inevitable, and has released an SDK for developer testing.   The language they chose to base the SDK around is Objective-C.   This wasn’t a complete surprise – after all, it’s the “native” language of Mac OS X.  However, while it’s not a surprise, I wonder if it’s not a major strategic error on Apple’s part.   The point is this: the Mac is a niche platform, and is especially niche in terms of numbers of developers building applications in Objective-C.    Compare that to iPhone, which because of its technological lead, has the chance to become a major volume player in the mobile phone space.   If Apple wants iPhone to succeed, it seems strange to attempt to force developers to use an unpopular language for programming it. That  isn’t the way to win – developers have many, many choices of platforms they can spend time developing for.
Note that I’m not saying that Objective-C is a bad language.  I’m just saying it’s unpopular.  How unpopular?  Well, the TIOBE Programming Community Index for April 2008 has just been released.  Here’s the list, in order (most popular first), of programming languages that are more popular with developers than Objective-C.

• Java
• C
• Visual Basic
• PHP
• C++
• Perl
• Python
• C#
• Ruby
• Delphi
• JavaScript
• D
• PL/SQL
• SAS
• Pascal
• Lisp/Scheme
• FoxPro/xBase
• COBOL
• Ada
• ColdFusion
• Logo
• Lua
• ActionScript
• Fortran
• RPG
• MATLAB
• Prolog
• Awk
• Transact-SQL
• ABAP
• LabView
• Erlang
• Groovy
• Smalltalk
• Haskell
• PL/I
• Bash
• Objective-C

By this measure, almost any language would be a better choice than Objective-C if the goal is to attract developers to a platform.   I think it would be smart for Apple to now to think about releasing SDKs in more popular programming languages.  Which one should be next?  Look at the list above. Decisions like this really aren’t, or certainly shouldn’t be, rocket science. And no – the answer isn’t Tcl/Tk

trisun

I guess I am one of the 68%, but start to get used to it.

katsura

momomomomo

[ 本帖最后由 katsura 于 22-8-2011 20:48 编辑 ]