iOS When did you 'click' with Objective-C

[JimBobBennett]

Not sure if 'click' is the right term but...

I'm an experienced developer, C++, C#, 11 years worth. Mainly windows, but some Ansi C++ on UNIX.
Until a few weeks ago I'd never tried Objective-C or Mac development.

When I write Windows apps, I feel totally confident, and can bend the language and tools to my will, creating apps that do what I want and are well crafted, easily extendable and feel polished.

My first iPhone app works well, but the code feels hacky as I'm still very much on a vast learning curve. I guess its a combination of trying so many things to acheive my goals, and feeling unsure about the whole OO methodologies of Objective-C based on my C++/C# background.

So how long did it take you to feel like you've mastered the langauge enough to be a polished coder rather than a hacker?

 

[Svinja]

i was in the same position as you about six months ago, i had pretty much experience in c++ and c# but didnt even heard about objective-c until i got the job. It took me about 3 months to get used to the language and the whole concept, i had a lot of memory leaks in the beginning but that wasn't the biggest problem, SDK had some strange bugs, i lost a lot of time on them. It is not hard, but it takse some time to get used to it.

 

[firewood]

I would guess somewhere around 2 months for an experienced programmer to start to "click" with Obj-C, and be able to write a complex iPhone app while thinking about the app logic and not the code syntax. However, I found there was still new stuff about the paradigm to learn for many more months.

Learning all the foundation APIs available, and their weaknesses and strengths, is what actually takes a lot more time.

If you can do both scripting and low level coding, I suggest thinking about what it would take to implement a toy version of the Obj-C preprocessor and runtime dispatch (compared to C#). When you at least have a glimpse of what's going on "under the hood", the syntax stops being a mystery.

imho.

 

[MacDonaldsd]

It took me a few months to learn enough of Objective-C to be competent in it, that was about 2 years ago now. Now its my full time Job