Do I have to learn Objective-C for professional Mac Development? [closed]

Answer 1

Do I really have to learn Objective-C to develop solid Mac Apps?

Currently, yes.

As Mac users tend to use only applications that have a nice (native) GUI, i don't think that Mono and GTK+ or any Java GUI (Swing) will fit their needs.

Correct.

There are projects like Cocoa#, PyObjC and RubyCocoa, but are they ready for primetime?

Cocoa#: I don't know, as I don't use C#.

PyObjC: Sort of, but Cocoa in Python is a bit of a hack, since Python isn't Smalltalky enough.

RubyCocoa: Maybe. I'm waiting for MacRuby to mature, though. See also:

• Jens Alfke on MacRuby
• Jesper on MacRuby

Answer 2

If you try hard enough, you can go about producing software without using Objective-C that has the potential to be great except for the fact that at the end of the day it won't be very good. You will spend more time trying to harangue a language into doing something that it isn't the absolute best at. At WWDC I wore a shirt that said "Learn Objective-C or Retire" which didn't go over too well with some people who still held dearly onto the last threads of Pascal's life, but the point is altogether true - Objective C is where it's at on the Mac and to pretend otherwise is to do yourself a disservice.

Having said that, you should definitely not rule out the bridges on the platform for extending your application - Bill Bumgarner is quick to point out how much power the Twisted networking framework provides to Cocoa applications via the PyObjC bridge.

Answer 3

Not only you have to know Objective-C (the easy part), you must be very comfortable with plain old C. That's in my opinion the biggest challenge for most people.

Answer 4

Not programming in a scripting language turns out to not be so bad when you're using XCode. The GDB integration is very good; I'm primarily a Perl guy, and I find the XCode debugger very nice and very easy to use.

The "fix" feature will really surprise you with how usable it is. Imagine finding a bug in your ObjC code, fixing it, and then telling the debugger to continue on. It actually works in a lot of cases.

Try ObjC. You may find you like it a lot better than you think you will.

Answer 5

No. While Apple is strongly pushing Cocoa, Carbon is still supported. It uses plain C instead. As for good-looking GUIs, just use Interface Builder.

However, I must say that Objective-C is a great language. It is really easy (it was my first language) and very powerful.

Answer 6

No you don't have to learn cocoa however it is worth looking at because it is an incredibly powerful api and very well documented, if you already know C then its very easy (honestly it is - i know it looks daunting syntactically).

The problem with the bridged approach on OS X is it seems to be very immature and only really designed for people who are prepared to read the documentation associated with the main cocoa api.

In all honesty if you know c you will pick up the basics of obj-c with a book, the one by Arron Hilligas (spelling?!?!) is superb.