Learning Objective-C will change you. The way Java changed you seemed to feel good. The way Objective-C is changing you is different.
And a little more on Objective-C versus Java over here by Dan Benjamin. Given I'm taking a programming languages course from an Objective-C... guy... I should be thinking of these things. (And especially the "lab" that I'm sure is due Wednesday or later but, of course, fear is due tomorrow. But I checked: Wednesday. I'll start after I'm done here.)
This sentence sticks in my craw:
But when you've been conditioned, no, spoiled for so long by the elegance of Java, it's hard to... worry about things like garbage collection again.
Maybe I've been away from it for so long, but out-and-out elegance isn't a quality I would ascribe to Java. Sure, it's better than C in that it has its own garbage collection and whatnot, but there are a lot of scripting languages that have those advantages over C too, and aren't burdened with C's history of braces and semicolons.
Or maybe Dr Andy is poisoning my mind.
It's the system of Java that's special, I guess, and it's that thick stack of software that got me sick of using it on a Pentium 233. The most regular thing I would do was use appletviewer to run a crossword application because the browser VMs sucked. I never finished the Jabber client I was writing, much less saw it run on a cell phone with J2ME. I don't have anywhere to mess with JSP. I don't want to make shoddy Swing UIs, which means I bang my head on layout managers instead of layout stuff and getting things working. The best I did was craft a few tiny trinkets for someone for a few bucks.
I should try a Java project now that I'm no longer on the anemic computer(s) that drove me to quitting it. Unfortunately I'm fresh out. As Dr Andy assumes with good reason Java is one of the languages everyone already has under the belt, I don't think we'll be writing anything in it. (The aforementioned homework is to write a particular program in Basic and Pascal--and not Basic- and Pascal-pidgin--and for us graduate students, a one-page paper reviewing two articles on teaching programming with Basic and Pascal and contrasting them with our experience writing the programs.)
So I guess I'll get to it, after I eat.
