Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by stcredzero 4780 days ago
I hope this isn't Metrowerks CodeWarrior all over again. Hopefully, there won't develop a significant "underclass" of developers who simply won't venture away from the parts of iOS that haven't been given a "Ruby-like" facade. Right now, Apple has a wonderful situation where over 90% of the devs and users adopt the newest versions of the OS. They should hate to lose that.

(I am all for choice, though. I wish Apple had a way of "blessing" frameworks and languages that have automated and/or inherent ways of absorbing additions to iOS, and was specific about this.)
2 comments
jamon51 4780 days ago
There's pretty much nothing you can do in Objective-C that you can't in RubyMotion.

RubyMotion exposes 100% of the Objective-C runtime with virtually no performance penalty. They are very on top of new iOS releases (released full iOS 6 support within a week).

In fact, I think that the RubyMotion community adopts new iOS technologies faster since it's new and doesn't have a lot of legacy code.

link
stcredzero 4780 days ago
There is a significant difference between APIs that are named/structured in a Ruby-like way, and APIs that are named according to Objective-C/Smalltalk conventions. This can be a cause of significant pain. (For example, while refactoring, you have to search for all the ways a method could be called.)

RubyMotion is doing the right things. Much of the result also depends on community. It's a bad sign when supposedly smart programmers disdain a technology or a set of tech conventions simply because it's different. Especially when that tech has a great track record. It's really weird when they disdain the very thing they're building on. I've met some RubyMotion programmers like this, however. I hope they're just an aberration.

link
tvon 4779 days ago
It would be great if Apple up and acquired RubyMotion. As it stands I'm hesitant to invest serious time in a system that isn't a first class citizen of the platform I'm building for, especially since there are things I actually like about Objective-C (despite coming from a Ruby and Python background).

I'm only a few days into using RubyMotion so I haven't formed a complete opinion yet, but my current concern is that I will end up becoming skilled at using a set of gems instead of becoming skilled at using the platform.

link