Objective-C Programming: Will Learning C and/or Smalltalk Help? [closed]

Question

Objective-C is an object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. I understand that learning Smalltalk might be good in the same way that learning Lisp is good for one's knowledge, but I want to know if learning Smalltalk-specific concepts will help me to understand Objective-C more completely, given Smalltalk's role in its "origin story". If so, what specifically?

Assuming that one already knows C programming, what can we learn from Smalltalk? Obviously, there's a lot of concepts in Objective-C that just aren't in C (ie. messaging, interfaces, protocols, dynamic typing, delegation, reflection; it's object-oriented!) but are derived from Smalltalk.

Edit: I've added the C programming language to the question, as the general consensus is that learning C is a better use of one's time than learning Smalltalk (when it comes to programming in Objective-C).

Answer 1

Smalltalk is an incredibly compact language and remains one of the most pure object oriented languages. Objective-C is a pragmatic compromise between Smalltalk and C, which makes for some very substantial differences. For example, in Smalltalk everything is an object — even simple numbers — and every manipulation of an object is by message sending. Messages are evaluated in the same order irrespective of their name. So e.g. the following:

8 + 9 / 23 + 16 * 8

Is evaluated in strict left-to-right order because the operators '+', '/' and '*' have no special meaning to the language being just messages that are passed on to number objects.

Objective-C adds Smalltalk-style objects to C but is also a strict superset of C that retains C's primitive types and built-in operators. So in Objective-C the normal mathematical order of operations would be applied to the expression above — the division and the multiplication would be done first, the additions afterwards.

Learning C is absolutely essential to a thorough understanding of Objective-C. Objective-C is a strict superset of C and explicitly uses exactly the same syntax and semantics as far as they go. It grafts the concept of objects onto C by virtue of C's ability to retain a pointer to a thing without knowing how to apply any operations to the thing. It then extends the C syntax to provide a means for posting messages to objects and for declaring and implementing the messages an object may receive.

A lot of the general design of the Objective-C runtime, especially when coupled with Cocoa, comes directly from Smalltalk, including the concept of a selector, the use of metaclasses as factories for instances of classes, the hierarchy and system of inheritance, the division of model-view-controller (a Smalltalk original, albeit now almost ubiquitous) and a lot of the messages defined on the standard collections and objects.

Off the top of my head, Smalltalk also differs greatly in its system of flow control and has a similar but subtly different idea of a 'block' (though most newer implementations have brought the two into line). Apple have actually implemented blocks as an extension at the C level which is utilised by a lot of the newer methods on Objective-C objects.

That all being said, the Goldberg Smalltalk-80 book is extremely well written, easy to read and the language is so simple that you can learn the whole language in just two or three chapters. Most of the complexity is swallowed by the objects available in the runtime, and obviously that stuff doesn't transfer. The benefit to you is that the ideological stuff about objects and runtimes ends up very separated from the specifics in print. Conversely, C makes stuff like flow control and arithmetic a language feature, which means more syntax and more to read before you really feel you know what's going on.

So, in conclusion: the Smalltalk-80 book (the purple one) is definitely worth a read and extremely helpful but not necessarily entirely relevant. Learning C is essential in any case; my references to K&R are for comparison.

Answer 2

From Smalltalk you can learn real object-oriented programming. Hybrids like java, c# and Delphi don't seem to do so well. After ten years of hybrids, my coding style significantly improved after a few months of Smalltalk.

As an iPhone developer, you're probably more interested in the design of the libraries and the concepts used than the syntax. c is not going to be any help there (though you need to understand some basics). Programming in Objective C feels much more similar to programming in Smalltalk. The Smalltalk IDEs are far superior to the Objective C ones, and help you understand much better how object-oriented code works, and how to build it. It is much easier to keep your code clean and well-refactored in a Smalltalk (IDE) than in any other object-oriented language. The cocoa libraries are very well designed, at least when compared to the java or .net ones. They seem to be in somewhat better shape than e.g. the Squeak Smalltalk ones.