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I don't think being interpreted matters. It may make your immediate development cycle faster, but that says nothing about long term development. I imagine the Scala guys would argue heavily that being compiled is a huge advantage to the power of that language, and would also strongly disagree that it isn't a high level language. Objective-C properties are poorly done in my opinion, though you can add one in two lines with a given set of assumptions. But I don't think 1 vs. 3 lines is a meaningful indicator of very much either way; it's a small constant penalty, not some lack of expression at the core of the language. Being verbose isn't a bad thing, and Objective-C isn't verbose in any meaningfully different way than most other languages. Header files may be a slight inconvenience, but they aren't even strictly necessary. Cocoa, the framework most commonly associated with Objective-C is verbose, and I think its a good thing. 90% of what you do as a programmer is read code, not write it. I gladly pay the penalty of 2x the keystrokes in return for half the mental overhead in reading the code. In reality, the penalty is less than 2, and the benefit may be more than 2, but its a matter of opinion. You say you wouldn't like Obj-C as an interpreted language, I wonder if you're aware of Objective-J (http://cappuccino.org). It's essentially an interpreted version of Objective-C. It doesn't have header files, and it doesn't do properties the same way (it only does code generation for accessor methods, nothing else, but that generation is one extra keyword). It's interpreted, it has closures, and it generally has every feature JavaScript already has, plus dynamic message sending and classical inheritance courtesy of the Obj-J runtime (which is functionally equivalent to the Obj-C runtime). I'm biased, but I think its a great language. |
I like to quote Peter Norvig on the subject of interpreted languages. But in his quote, he uses "interactive." Maybe that's a better word:
"Which way would you rather learn to play the piano: the normal, interactive way, in which you hear each note as soon as you hit a key, or "batch" mode, in which you only hear the notes after you finish a whole song? Clearly, interactive mode makes learning easier for the piano, and also for programming. Insist on a language with an interactive mode and use it." - Peter Norvig, Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.
I've seen Objective-J and generally have good feelings about Javascript. But it's not particularly strong on one other criteria that I like to apply, which is that it should be easy to mix code written at different language levels.