Excellent post Scott. I like Python and Java programming languages a lot, but I am equally fond of Objective-C. To me, Objective-C is the language to go for to write Cocoa, simply because there's already so much Objective-C code for Cocoa out there. That said, I wouldn't mind using something else if I had a good reason to.
Nevertheless, if you look at what happened with other languages/GUI toolkits you can see a trend. Most, if not all, GUI toolkits appear to be tied to a particular language. Even though bindings are available for other languages, there's always a, largely, dominant one. Most people are writing Swing in Java, most people are writing QT in C++, most people are writing WinForms in C#, and so on.
But I am glad we have the choice. Python and Ruby support for Cocoa is nice because there will be some programmers who will prefer to use those languages rather than Objective-C but I highly doubt this will be the case of all Cocoa developers, even if performance wasn't an issue (and I'm pretty sure it is already not an issue for many applications.)
by Romain Guy — Feb 19
Nevertheless, if you look at what happened with other languages/GUI toolkits you can see a trend. Most, if not all, GUI toolkits appear to be tied to a particular language. Even though bindings are available for other languages, there's always a, largely, dominant one. Most people are writing Swing in Java, most people are writing QT in C++, most people are writing WinForms in C#, and so on.
But I am glad we have the choice. Python and Ruby support for Cocoa is nice because there will be some programmers who will prefer to use those languages rather than Objective-C but I highly doubt this will be the case of all Cocoa developers, even if performance wasn't an issue (and I'm pretty sure it is already not an issue for many applications.)
Choice is good.