Ruby Motion

Even though I’m mostly comfortable with Obj-C and the Cocoa Touch API these days, I still don’t like it. 

I know these things are ultimately going to be painful and sticking with Apple’s one-true-path with Obj-C is the best way, I’m still so tempted because I enjoy Ruby so much. 

John Siracusa has never been impressed: Bridges of Siracusa County and The Housewives of Siracusa County and I’m inclined to agree. Getting comfortable with Obj-C is the best way.

But honestly, I really don’t like Obj-C. I’m paddling up hill all day with Cocoa Touch just praying that one day I’ll start enjoying it more. The end result is just so good though that that pain is worth it. Thank god for ARC I guess :)

Apparently some people think Ruby Motion is not a bridge.

RubyMotion is not a bridge; it actually generates native applications that are as fast as the ones written in Objective-C . 

John Siracusa would disagree…

Either way I’m tempted to take a look. Especially as you can mix in Obj-C if you need to - which is important if things are not going your way and you need to get to the metal. Which is sort of a point against Ruby Motion. 

But in it’s favour:

Simple, as in Ruby

Ruby is a very high-level programming language designed to make humans productive and happy. It has a concise and flexible syntax that can be used to express powerful algorithms in very little code.

While Ruby was designed on the same semantics as Objective-C, it is syntaxically different. Ruby has no header files, no complicated syntax to define classes, properties or builtin types, and doesn’t suffer from single namespace issues. We can go on. And Ruby offers many more features, while remaining simpler.

RubyMotion brings the Ruby language on iOS, allowing you to make use of the iOS frameworks from a very convenient and productive language.

You already know Ruby? You can write iOS apps, today.

Less is so much more to me. 

I wonder if they’ll release a non-commercial licensed version for people to kick the tyres with. I just buy it anyway and take a look.

The Pragmatic Studio intro video is great: http://pragmaticstudio.com/screencasts/rubymotion

When I’m swapping between ‘Rails dev and Cocoa Touch the ability to stay in Ruby is appealing to me.