Every so often I dig out my Xcode stuff and have a go at exploring developing an idea for Mac OS X. Everytime the same thing happens to me: Objective-C is such an offensive language to my sensibilities that I get diverted into doing something else. All the lessons that we have learned the hard way over the years -- the importance of strong static typing, the importance of tools for large scale programming -- seem to have fallen on deaf ears in the Objective-C community. How long did it take to get garbage collection into the language? I also feel that some features of Objective-C represent an inherent security risk (in particular categories) that would make me very nervous to develop a serious application in it. As it happens, I am currently developing a programming language for Complex Event Processing. Almost every choice that I am making in that language is the opposite to the choice made for Objective-C -- my language is strongly, statically typed; it is designed for parallel exe
A sporadic series of essays on things that interest me. Mostly about programming in one form or another.