Personally, me, I learned to program way back when we had to chisel punch cards out of stone. Then after programming for many platforms mostly, procedural, and when the iPhone came along, I picked up object oriented programming just for Obc C in XCode.
Studied every line in the HelloWorld.app.
Wrote an outline for an app I wanted to write.
Dissected the core task of that app until each subtask could be accomplished by programming mnemonics with which I was already familiar and which I beleived would likely be or should be represented in XCode Objective C.
If I didn't know the XCode Obj-C syntax for a mnemonic, I googled, asked in this forum or read the reference material until I did know the syntax.
I kept that up until I understood all of them and then, of course, the app worked and was finished.
Now I am writing another.
Learning to program and learning to program for any particular platform, including the iPhone are two different things.
Programming is about learning how to separate any irrational, ambiguous task into sub tasks and further separate those sub tasks into even smaller sub tasks until each sub task can be accomplished by a single unambiguously definitive instruction mnemonic.
Objective programmers would never call [receiver message] a mnemonic because they think of jnz and ld as assembler mnemonics but in the strictest of meaning, the highest level programming languages are simply made of mnemonics which are all compiled to machine code.
I learned to program than I learned the mnemonics for each platform.
And I agree with Meek, Obj C is very, tediously verbose. Whoever came up with the concept was so true to his idea that he forgot that programming should be far simpler. Then after that, he caved anyway and still allowed functions instead of requiring everything to be a method. So I guess we are stuck with a cute idea that is still saddled with every other cute programming idea that ever came along.
Jerry
