On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 9:58 PM, Andy Lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > There's already an inherent lower bound on the barrier to entry for Cocoa. > You have to understand certain fundamentals -- some conceptual, some > procedural. If you don't have those fundamentals, you'll never make Cocoa > work. There is also a set of people on this planet who are trying to grasp > those fundamentals and are perfectly capable of doing so. To argue that > it's better for the platform if those people take a little longer to become > proficient at Cocoa seems to me a bit odd.
I don't think anyone has argued that - although I could be wrong. I think the argument is that it's better for the platform if everyone understands, as you say, the fundamentals. A *lot* of people recently have been trying to skip them. As you also said, they'd be perfectly capable of learning them, but for various reasons are not attempting to do so. Most of those folks, I suspect, have one or all of .NET, Java, and C++ in their background. If they have all three, they probably were able to learn the latter two by skipping their conceptual docs, as these environments are strikingly similar. Having done so twice, they have established an expectation that they should be able to learn a new environment without much reference to the introductory material, and approach Cocoa with that expectation. Unfortunately, that expectation is flawed in the general case, and in the specific case of learning Cocoa. This route to learning happens to work well when moving among that group of languages, simply because they're so similar. But Objective-C and Cocoa really are fundamentally different, with a dynamic runtime, selectors and message dispatch, strong and consistent use of patterns throughout, etc. Imagine someone moving from Los Angeles to London, picking up a dictionary and taking a few months to learn the local slang and idioms. Not too difficult, right? Now imagine that same person, based on that experience of moving to a foreign country and rapidly assimilating the language with little to no help, moving to Berlin. Imagine him trying to learn the German language in the same way, with no lessons or introductory material - just a dictionary. sherm-- -- Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
