[damian2000]

what's an advantage of being too verbose? extra exercise for your fingers? ;-)

[rimantas]

With autocomplete you don't get much extra exercise anyway. It helps to strain your brain less however when reading the code.

[chc]

I don't think "arrayByAddingObjectsFromArray:" is particularly clearer than "concat" or "+" unless you're just totally unfamiliar with the language. In fact, for many selectors I find the shorter names easier to read because my brain sees them as a single token while I have to mentally parse Cocoa's behemoths every time I run across them. There is some benefit to clarity, but very often Objective-C's glut of information makes it harder to pick out the details you were looking for. Smalltalk was considered quite readable and in fact was the inspiration for Objective-C and Cocoa, but its selectors were more minimal (for example, the equivalent to the above methods is #addAll:).

(Just to establish that I'm not completely talking out my rear end: I've been programming Objective-C for ten years, Ruby for five.)

[kennywinker]

oh crap, does concat create a new object, or mutate the current one? is it the same as using + or do they handle objects differently....? should I be using << here maybe?

I agree with you that the verbosity of ObjC makes it harder to mentally parse fast, but I also think there is a lot of clarity to it when you read it slow.

Where I see ObjC fall down is more in terms of command verbosity. For example in Ruby,

    File.open("readfile.rb", "r") do |infile|
      while (line = infile.gets)
        puts "#{line}"
      end
    end

...would be ~150 lines of code in ObjC (Dave DeLong: http://stackoverflow.com/a/3711079/196358). Which is not really a failing of the language, actually. It's a failing of the libraries that come with the language.

Apple chose to give you a couple ways to read a file. The easy way is `stringWithContentsOfFile:encoding:error:error`, but the next level of control is way to low level. Dave DeLong's solution to reading a file line by line exposes an api that looks like this:

    DDFileReader * reader = [[DDFileReader alloc] initWithFilePath:pathToMyFile];
    [reader enumerateLinesUsingBlock:^(NSString * line, BOOL * stop) {
      NSLog(@"%@", line);
    }];

Not actually much more complex or verbose than the ruby.

[agos]

it has big advantages in terms of readability and is necessary for self-documenting code

[pjmlp]

You can always make use of APL if you don't like typing.

[chc]

You could always make use of enterprise Java if you like verbosity.

The extremes are probably not the place to be.

[pjmlp]

Verbosity is good when you need to maintain projects developed with 300+ developers, scattered across the globe with multiple companies working on the project.

Why do you think verbose languages are so loved by big enterprise companies?

It is a total different scale of development.