Great review, Scott. It's interesting to note that practically all you described took place in the last few weeks: It has been a busy time for the Cocoa-web.
Personally, I don't think properties are all that hot, but if it makes some people happy, I'm all for them. I prefer the brackets, but that may be due to the crazy highlighting scheme I use, which makes reading code more a matter of color matching than character recognition :-) When I started programming in ObjC, I came to like the Smalltalk-ish brackets because they rather unambigously told this newby programmer that a message was getting sent, but I have to admit that things were getting a bit blurry with the additional de-facto abstration that KVC offers. And I love the garbage collector. Having to manage memory by hand is utterly ridiculous for the vast majority of applications that get written today.
One thing I didn't get this year was the MacHeist controversy. All the developers are adults and fully knew what they were doing. In any case, it raised a ton of money for charity and it means that 16,000 people now potentially use TextMate (and develop bundles for it). If those two things can't make the world a saner place, what can :-) ?
Overall, I think, these last few months were quite a display of strength from the Mac Developer community, and I was happy to watch all of it unfold. Let's hope 2007 will be as interesting as the last year.
by Michael Stroeck — Jan 02
Personally, I don't think properties are all that hot, but if it makes some people happy, I'm all for them. I prefer the brackets, but that may be due to the crazy highlighting scheme I use, which makes reading code more a matter of color matching than character recognition :-) When I started programming in ObjC, I came to like the Smalltalk-ish brackets because they rather unambigously told this newby programmer that a message was getting sent, but I have to admit that things were getting a bit blurry with the additional de-facto abstration that KVC offers. And I love the garbage collector. Having to manage memory by hand is utterly ridiculous for the vast majority of applications that get written today.
One thing I didn't get this year was the MacHeist controversy. All the developers are adults and fully knew what they were doing. In any case, it raised a ton of money for charity and it means that 16,000 people now potentially use TextMate (and develop bundles for it). If those two things can't make the world a saner place, what can :-) ?
Overall, I think, these last few months were quite a display of strength from the Mac Developer community, and I was happy to watch all of it unfold. Let's hope 2007 will be as interesting as the last year.
P.S.: "remember, new year": Nice touch, Scott :-)