Xaltlee's Journal: Mac Programming and Java

I've been thinking about biting the bullet and learning to develop actual applications - for the Mac. I've gotten my feet wet recently with Jscript.NET. The last time (before this .NET thing) that I touched compiled code, I was eighteen and it made no sense to me. Now I've been in the workplace for a few years, and have the syntax of one (albeit permissive) language down pat. I know enough that I've created a working application - with .NET, anyway. I'm told that Java and Jscript have similar syntax, but previously, I had no clue what a class was; some things don't carry over very well syntactically between the two. Now that I know, theoretically I could do something.

1. Are there any other language options? Need to research this one. I'm sure C will be available, but it seems rather intimidating. Maybe the Cocoa framework will be so well-documented and intelligent that the language won't be too much of a pain to deal with?

2. Why the Mac? Because I'm going to buy one soon. It turns out Apple DOES have loans. I'll be grabbing a TiBook - it's more suited to my needs than the beautiful new iMac. *sigh* So if I learn a new system, why not learn to code it? And better yet, it'll theoretically be easy for anyone to port any apps I make over to other systems. Always a plus, especially to a web developer, used to compatibility as I am. I like Macs and want to see Apple succeed.

3. What's stopping me? No knowledge, pretty much. I'm a rank newbie. Newsgroups are wonderful things, though, and having seen how easy .NET was, I can't imagine it'll get much harder. (And if it is, maybe I can find a way to simplify it somewhere down the road.)

Hmm. Have to think about this one.