As an active member of "The Internet" and vocal Objective-C coder, I get a lot of questions surrounding the language. They're often framed around thinking about learning the language or trying to write an app, but they also usually involve a phrase like "Objective-C looks really hard" or "what are all those minus signs about?" Both of these are pretty good questions, and I'd like to address why someone might be more hesitant to jump into iOS or OS X development compared to, say, Ruby or Java.SyntaxLet's talk about what a programming language is. A programming language is the human-readable cod...

Kent Nguyen has a great article about how building iOS apps takes a lot of work. And, here at Parse, we agree. Making a well-designed app is not a trivial task. Many non-developers hugely underestimate the amount of sweat and tears that goes into a single app.The big component that is overlooked and that Kent stresses is the server component. An app is not an island. Users expect their apps to richly interact with the internet.This means you need to worry about developing code on servers, communicating with servers, APIs, and a whole plethora of network issues.And this is the exact reason why ...

Let me first say that I am a Scala lover and have been a Scala champion for almost 5 years.  I've written books and articles on Scala.  I've worked with dozens of companies that have launched Scala and Lift projects.  I've code reviewed many dozens of Scala projects.I used to think that Scala was easy.  It was, and continues to be, a cure for some of the numerous problems with Java.  From the "stuff that's hard or impossible in Java is simple in Scala," Scala is a very easy language.  Dealing with collections is super easy in Scala.  Isolating business logic ...

Odds are, you don’t use a functional programming language every day. You probably aren’t getting paid to write code in Scala, Haskell, Erlang, F#, or a Lisp Dialect. The vast majority of people in the industry use OO languages like Python, Ruby, Java or C#–and they’re happy with them. Sure, they might occasionally use a “functional feature” like “blocks” now and then, but they aren’t writing functional code.And yet, for years we’ve been told that functional languages are awesome. I still remember how confused I was when I first ...

Bob Parsons (below) may be best known as the man standing next to the “GoDaddy Girls,” the busty spokesmodels for his online registration company, GoDaddy.Com.Gerry ImagesToday, he has a new catchphrase: billionaireSource : http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/06/24/a-new-billionaires-10-rules-for-success/The possible purchase of his company by private-equity firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and SilverLake Partners for more than $2 billion would make him the latest dot-com billionaire. It is unclear how much of the company he owns. Since it is closely held and hasn’t done much fund...