Learning Cocoa is Slow
Published at 16:54 on 5 January 2012
(For the non-geeks, Cocoa is the user interface library on the Macintosh. It’s what lets you write programs that use the familiar windows, menus, alerts, and whatnot that a typical Mac program has.)
Part of it is learning a new language (and not precisely a nice, clean one: Objective-C is almost as crufty as C++), part of it is that the innards of the Mac just seem counterintuitive to me.
On the former issue, there are actually alternatives to Objective-C, including as of recently C#, a language which is far more modern and easy to use. Unfortunately, most of those are open-source projects as opposed to things with Apple’s explicit sanction and blessing, and as I’ve said before, shoddy documentation is the Achilles’ heel of open-source software.
Which raises the latter issue: the documentation and design of Xcode seems to be based on an assumption that both Xcode and Cocoa are intuitive. It documentation keeps talking about how Xcode makes everything easy and logical. For me at least, it certainly is not.
However, slow as the process of fighting with Xcode is, at least Xcode and Objective-C are fairly comprehensively documented by Apple. I hate to think of how much more difficult trying to learn Cocoa in C# would be.