I feel like I'm the only person in the world who would rather write ugly win32 jank for the rest of my days than ever having to touch an "elegant" or "well structured" Cocoa codebase. In win32 if you want a button you call a function and pass a hande, in the Apple world you first subclass 7 interfaces in some unreadable Smalltalk-wannabe syntax and pray you don't need to access the documentation. And of course they constantly change things because breaking backwards compatibility is Apple's kink.

After bouncing around GUI toolkits (from win32 to SwiftUI) and web for 30 years I have simply run out of fucks. They all suck. Each in their own unique way. Apple aren't worth singling out - they are just their own special isolated variant of it.

This is patently false. To add a button to your UI, you open your window’s nib file Xcode/Interface Builder, click the plus button on the toolbar, and add a button. Then you control-drag from the button to File’s Owner and choose the method that you want to invoke when the button is clicked. Done.

That feels like quite the exaggeration. If all you want is a button, all you need to do is initialize an NSButton and then tweak a few properties to customize it as desired.

If you want something more custom, subclass NSControl and you’re off to the races.

And if Obj-C isn’t your cup of tea, one can use Swift instead, even in a codebase that had been only Obj-C prior.

How to add a button in SwiftUI:

    Button(“Click Me”) { buttonWasClicked() }

You can now use SwiftUI, which is, as of the latest version, quite stable. They used to change things a lot between releases a few years ago, but nowadays you don't need to refactor your code every year. Only issue with it is that it's iOS first, so you may need to fallback to AppKit (Cocoa) to implement more complex elements.

Sorry, but this is simply just misinformation.

If you were doing "classic" Cocoa in the way it was intended, you wouldn't need to subclass anything for a simple button.

You wouldn't even need to write a single line of code, you'd just instantiate said button in Interface Builder, hook it up to a delegate (e.g. a window controller) and off you go. You can create a hello world example with a handful lines of code.

And even if you'd rather create the button programmatically, it's not much more involved.

Sure, if you're coming from Win32 and expect to program Cocoa without learning Cocoa, you're out of luck. But I guess that applies to all frameworks.

I'm probably another, but I have never done any professional Win32 work. You know, those kind of jobs are rare now and I doubt they want anyone without experience.

This is such a wonderfully beneficial comment to the HN community. It should get an award.