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Question: Assuming you were an alien who knew nothing about Microsoft/Apple, and saw only their OSes/APIs, which would you pick today?
Asked by Will (70.173.150.x) on December 28 2010, 8:25pm
Reply on December 29 2010, 6:20am:
    I'll assume the MS API in question is plain win32 -- I haven't really touched their newer stuff, so I can't really judge it.

    It's hard to say, assuming I only saw the APIs. In theory I think Cocoa would look easier and simpler, assuming aliens could grasp objective C. I think after a few months programming both Cocoa and Win32, I probably would find Win32 to be more frustrating, because of all the cruft/legwork required to make things function right. For example, to get standard application behavior in plain Win32, you really have to define most of that logic in your application, whereas Cocoa does it all for you.

    OS X would be frustrating further down the line when you try to do more complex things, because it often does get in your way... and the documentation isn't great for complex things. A good example of this: when making a user-defined keyboard shortcut system, it is in many ways easier on Win32, because you need to implement how keyboard shortcuts are defined anyway -- in Cocoa normally you just set their equivalency in the top level menu and *boom* they work. Which is great, except for the fact that you are limited by how that system functions. Anyway...
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