Saturday May 19, 2012

RubyMotion Will Not Cure Ignorance

Excellent post by Victor Jalencas about his experience of RubyMotion:

Nowadays I know better. No matter whether you develop in Ruby or in Objective-C, the hardest part is getting intimate with the Cocoa frameworks. There’s no way around it. The way the Cocoa framework is architected, you have two ways to work with it: swim upstream, or go with the current. If you go with the current, easy things are easy and hard things are still hard, but doable. If you pretend to go against the current, you’ll have a hard time just to make the simplest of things.

I agree. Cocoa Touch is inescapable on iOS. You need to know how it works. Victor’s advice is great. Learn Objective-C. Learn Cocoa Touch. Xcode is a free download from the Mac App Store, anyway.

The one thing I would add, however, is that RubyMotion can help you experiment with Cocoa Touch in a way that you don’t get with Apple’s current tool chain. The live console REPL that let’s you poke around with your objects or specific controls while your code is running—it’s simply amazing.