In my previous post I talk about how I got rid of hundreds of thousands of lines of Objective-C code while at Audible and I explain why keeping Objective-C code around is a terrible idea. And I explain that…
I’m not stuck in the old ways; I’m not the guy insisting on the supremacy of Objective-C despite the obvious evidence against. I’m the guy who got rid of Objective-C — with glee and (oops, sorry Audible marketing team for the screwup) wild abandon!
Then of course I wrote some Objective-C code recently and really, really loved it.
Command line app
I wanted to replace my homegrown static website/blog generator because I no longer wanted to use the language it was written in, for reasons.
I took it as an opportunity to learn Python — but it turned out that my heart wasn’t in it (not Python’s fault; great language) and I ended up screwing it up. (See Blog Fuckup).
I thought about some alternatives: Swift, which I know well; Rust and Go, which would have the advantage of helping me branch out from the Apple ecosystem; and good old C, my happy-go-lucky friend who still sprints faster than every brash new language.
Of those I was leaning toward C because speed is an issue. I wanted to make rendering this blog, over 25 years old and with thousands of posts, to happen in under one second. The system I was replacing took a few seconds. But I wanted more speed (personality flaw).
And then I thought, I swear just for a split second, about how great it would be if C had something a little nicer than C structs for modeling my app’s data — and oh well too bad there’s nothing like that.
And then I remembered Objective-C, which is C plus some things a little nicer than C structs. 🎩🦖
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