Comments on: On Application Development

By: itjob123

itjob123 — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:51:11 +0000

I think to some degree, what he's talking about really revolves around a person's difficulty of accomplishing a desired task *relative* to one's understanding of the context. I think a lot of the discussion gets tied up because it tries to draw a fixed binary division across a gap that's wholly dependent on personal experience and domain-specific goals.

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By: lhl

lhl — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:21:47 +0000

For me, the issue seems to be that though he starts (red-herring like talking?) about scripting and programming “languages,” (and yes, it's wrong-headed), and then goes on to describe the difference in how he views the *activities* of “scripting” and “programming”… which I suppose is also nonsensical and doesn't parse in a “you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means” type of way (and it certainly has stirred up the languagenistas in the comments).

That being said, I don't think Atwood's trolling, but the vocabulary for describing that distinction just isn't there. I think to some degree, what he's talking about really revolves around a person's difficulty of accomplishing a desired task *relative* to one's understanding of the context. I think a lot of the discussion gets tied up because it tries to draw a fixed binary division across a gap that's wholly dependent on personal experience and domain-specific goals.

By: lhl

lhl — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:41:29 +0000

Yeah, horses for courses I guess.

I've found Objective-C to be annoying to infuriatingly, and Cocoa to be crufty and at times, just plain hateful. Casting between NS and CF contexts, the performance penalties for using getters so that you need to create local pointers for everything, the mess w/ NSStrings and annoyances w/ simple things like equality, switches and concatenation, all the context switches and then the mishmash of NS and CF stuff, sleeps and delays causing animations not to be thrown, etc. etc.

The application I've been working on is conceptually trivial, but it's been a slog plowing through it - I guess I just don't think in the right way.

By: Simon Willison

Simon Willison — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 06:26:53 +0000

Just to clarify, the only statement that really upsets me is “that's a scripting language, not a programming language”. Scripting languages are clearly a subset of programming languages. I'm OK with the use of the term scripting language provided it isn't used to make a comparison with “programming languages”. I do however think dynamic language is a more useful classification.

By: uvince

uvince — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 02:46:00 +0000

Woah! Matt's crazy for the stuff: “I’ve found Objective C to be a surprisingly pleasant language, and Cocoa is one of the best frameworks I’ve ever worked with”