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by binaryfinery 5643 days ago
"Mac iOS dev tools are beautiful and extremely slick"

And yet have features found in SlickEdit circa 1992.

Twenty fucking years later I'd expect my IDE to a bit smarter. It might look beautiful (to you) but its brain dead.
1 comments
rue 5642 days ago
Do you have some implementable ideas?
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binaryfinery 5642 days ago
Absolutely:

http://blog.binaryfinery.com/monotouch-qa

This is written for potential clients, rather than hackers, but I do go a bit deeper into why ObjectiveC sucks near the bottom.

Basically, use good tools. What hacker would create a website without analytics these days? Yet Apple wants us to settle for an editor that is dumb as bricks, when tools like Resharper or Eclipse that can not only analyze our code but refactor it automatically. XCode has 6 refactorings, and all of them will fail to do what you want, or just flat out refuse. Resharper has, I think, 120?

Resharper analyzes my code as I type. I develop iPhone apps on my PC in C# and even before I compile it on the Mac, I know its going to compile because Resharper has been analyzing it the whole time.

There are basically two problems with XCode and Objc and neither of them are solvable:

1) Writing tools for languages that have header files that can be included multiple times, and which require a class to be declared all over the place, is hard.

2) There's a shit load more developers for java, C, C++ and C# than there are for Objective-C. This may change, enough to incentivize groups (companies/oss) to write better tools, but they'll still be years behind groups like jetbrains or eclipse.

Now, C and C++ may be 20+ years old, but they've been in constant use and development that whole time, and by a majority of programmers. Yet even these languages have poor tools (the whole header issue). Objective-C is 20 years old, but with, what, a 15 year hiatus.

So the solution is to say "Why the fuck am I using a 20 year old language that lacks 20 years of tool development" and move on to something thats either a) newer or b) well established. I recommend MonoTouch.

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