Be Taught Programming

Cocoa follows sturdy grammatical conventions which immediately convey the meanings of methods. Verb phrases (“addObject”) carry out an motion and return nothing. Noun phrases (“arrayByAddingObject”) return the noun so named, and generally don’t have stateful effects except the name suggests so. Expected arguments are clearly indicated by the name, in Smalltalk style. (“addObject” takes an object; “addObjectsFromArray” takes an array.) Most Cocoa code can thus be read and a minimal of vaguely understood without documentation. Many folks revere HyperCard for initiating them into programming.

In contrast, an untyped language, such as most meeting languages, allows any operation to be performed on any information, typically sequences of bits of various lengths. High-level untyped languages embrace BCPL, Tcl, and some kinds of Forth. Not all syntactically appropriate packages are semantically appropriate. Many syntactically correct applications are nonetheless ill-formed, per the language’s guidelines; and should end in an error on …