Well, from my limited experience with Objective-C a few things made it hard.
The first is the traditional Cocoa pattern of a method that does useful things, which looks like this:
- (void)beautifullyNamedMethodFor {
void* ugly_ptr_type; // and around 45 more
CFObscurePtrRef* .. = CFObscureObsoleteFunction(NULL, NULL,.....); // 56 arguments
// to the callback omitted for brevity
...*....(*foo)...->(*x++);
// and so one - with 45 lines of NULL ptrs passed as void* to CF calls
// juggled and incremented ad absurdum until your eyes bleed.
}
So on the surface it's a beautiful Smalltalkish thing, while down below it's usually all hairy C, pointers and null-terminated strings and Core Foundation callbacks right out of MacOS 7 (especially if you want anything useful to be done that is not in Cocoa by default). This always seemed to me to be a deception in a way.
Another pet peeve of mine is the same agony of choice that is object variables (pointers versus values). When I want to return something or declare a variable, even when I am in the rose-tinted-glasses Cocoa world of beautifully-named methods, classes and keyword arguments I still have to put the dreaded death star in front of just the right things (and to remember NOT to put it in front of exactly proper other things).
So I guess for me the most problematic Objective-C part is the one that has to do with C (because it adds a level of complexities on top of C). The "Objective" part is actually very nice, once you get used to the call syntax and the brackets.
The first is the traditional Cocoa pattern of a method that does useful things, which looks like this:
So on the surface it's a beautiful Smalltalkish thing, while down below it's usually all hairy C, pointers and null-terminated strings and Core Foundation callbacks right out of MacOS 7 (especially if you want anything useful to be done that is not in Cocoa by default). This always seemed to me to be a deception in a way.Another pet peeve of mine is the same agony of choice that is object variables (pointers versus values). When I want to return something or declare a variable, even when I am in the rose-tinted-glasses Cocoa world of beautifully-named methods, classes and keyword arguments I still have to put the dreaded death star in front of just the right things (and to remember NOT to put it in front of exactly proper other things).
So I guess for me the most problematic Objective-C part is the one that has to do with C (because it adds a level of complexities on top of C). The "Objective" part is actually very nice, once you get used to the call syntax and the brackets.