Wow - this is fantastic! I'm glad i submitted this now, just reading the comments here is very heartening. I was beginning to think i was the only guy in the world who liked obj-c :) (i work in a c#/java predominaated environment where most people troll me about obj-c all day!)

I'd always considered myself a C++ guy before picking up obj-C, but looking at the result I get from the two I'm finding I'm just a lot faster with obj-C.

Now I have no desire to incite a language flamewar (to each their own blub!), so I will leave it at that ;)

I like obj-c, and never really found it hard. IMHO, the real challenge with Apple development is not the language but learning all the frameworks and the Apple way of doing things. The learning curve is a bit steep at first, but quite powerful (and intuitive) once you get over the hump.

I think Objective C is awesome, but I suspect many people have a hard time separating the language from the library. Apple has a pretty unique way of developing frameworks and SDKs. Comparing Android and iOS development, the Android SDK makes sense out of the box because it follows typical Java/C#/C++ style framework design.

99% of the people who use it have no choice, so not really.

But it's nice to see a semi-tutorial wrapped in an argument. Arguments are more fun to read than tutorials, so I picked up a few factoids (named args) without having to read Apple's documentation (which is a little dry).

It's important to realize, that ObjC (and Smalltalk, Self...) does not have named arguments in the conventional sense (ie. like Python, &key arguments in CL...) but mix parts of message name with it's arguments. In essence, it only looks like named arguments - and on the other hand, this syntax essentially precludes support for real named arguments. For why this is bad look at all these #with:, #with:with: ... #withValues: methods in Smalltalk's standard library that are only thin wrappers used to simulate true optional or named arguments.