036 iPhreaks Show – Other Languages

Panel

Jaim Zuber (twitter Sharp Five Software)
Pete Hodgson (twitter github blog)
Ben Scheirman (twitter github blog NSSreencast)
Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up)

Discussion
00:59 - Language Backgrounds
05:23 - Other Languages vs Objective-C

Static Typing
Go
LINQ
Semicolons
First-Class Functions

18:46 - Benefits of Using Objective-C

RubyMotion

25:44 - Building Apps Not Using Objective-C
29:36 - Xamarin
33:03 - Calatrava
33:39 - Appcelerator Titanium
38:01 - PhoneGap

Picks

Get an HD Antenna (Ben)
FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition (Jaim)
Forecast (Pete)
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (Pete)
MadTree Identity Crisis: A Black IPA from Cincinnati (Pete)
The Walking Dead (Chuck)
Duct Tape Marketing Revised & Updated: The World's Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide by John Jantsch (Chuck)

Next Week
MVC
Transcript

CHUCK:  Hey everybody and welcome to episode 36 of the iPhreaks Show. This week on our panel, we have Jaim Zuber.

JAIM:  Hello from Minneapolis.

CHUCK:  Pete Hodgson.

PETE:  Hello from San Francisco.

CHUCK:  Ben Scheirman’s going to be joining us in a few. This is a weird Christmas episode that we’re recording a little bit early. I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv and I just want to announce really quickly that if you go to RailsRampUp.com and you sign up before the end of the year, the 31st basically, actually I’m going to give you a few extra days. If you sign up by the 4th, then you can get 30 percent off if you want to learn Ruby on Rails, which is a handy thing for backend stuff.

Anyway, this week we’re going to talk about some of the differences between some of our language backgrounds that we have. Some of us come from more enterprise languages like .NET or Java and some of us come from the hippie languages like Ruby, so should be an interesting discussion.

JAIM:  I think so.

CHUCK:  So real quickly, besides Objective-C, what are your languages that come out of your tool bag when you need to do something different?

JAIM:  Well for a long time, I did C# and .NET. Even before that, it was C and C++, embedded stuff, thick client stuff. So I can write C in any language, pretty much. [Chuckles] But things that I like with Objective-C is I’m getting more familiar with how a dynamic language really helps us out, especially with testing and being able to be more fluid with our development. So I like that. But I definitely do come from a static language background. I don’t know. What about you guys?

PETE:  So I guess I’ve been all over the place. I started off my career in C++. So when I first started doing iOS development, that actually felt quite familiar in some ways, doing manual memory management and all that fun stuff. And then I bounced around a bunch. I did some C#. I did a fair amount of Ruby. I still do quite a lot of Ruby. I do a lot of JavaScript. I do my current project, I’m writing Scala. I’m doing embedded C++ development in my spare time at the moment with Arduinos.

So I guess I’ve been all over the place. But my main, my language I reach for the most is probably Ruby, still. And yeah, it’s interesting. I guess I’ve come to my journey into Objective-C is the opposite where I’m coming more from a dynamic place and seeing how it’s actually quite nice to have a type system sometimes, or have a static type system sometimes, and annoying as well.

CHUCK:  Very nice.

BEN:  It was a good fight we have right now.

[Laughter]

PETE:  You know what? If you ever want to play with a strong type system, do some Scala development and you’ll either fall in love with type safety or you’ll absolutely hate it. It’s been driving me a little bit crazy but it’s also pretty cool. But anyway, that’s I guess a different podcast.

CHUCK:  Yeah. My background, I did Java and C++ in college but didn’t really take it seriously.