Meet the Parents

This week I've spent Tuesday and Wednesday in a developer training class for Mac OS X's Cocoa development environment. The class is still in the process of being assembled, so our feedback was greatly appreciated. Although we covered some ground I already know about (since I use Cocoa every day at work), we also covered some subjects that were new to me (at least, in the context of this framework), like how Cocoa threads work, and advanced use of notifications.

It took me a while to learn that the key to using an advanced framework is learning how to navigate around the documentation to figure out what you can do, and how. Cocoa is pretty well-documented (as opposed to Microsoft's Visual Basic, which is horribly documented, or was last I checked). It's also got some nice flexibility in terms of revealing how the high-level constructs in the UI work at a lower level, which makes it fairly convenient to enhance in a user application.

Cocoa, of course, is based on NeXTStep and OpenStep, a development framework dating back more than 12 years. It's certainly to the credit of its original designers and its maintainers through the years that it still feels fresh and powerful, even compared to other frameworks out there. A few folks seem intimidated that its native language is Objective-C, an object-oriented C-based language which is somewhat different from the C++ and Java model. I don't think there's any reason to be, though; the fundamentals are similar, and once you master the syntax and get used to dynamic type-checking, you should find it simple to use. (Myself, I've disliked strong static type-checking ever since I was first introduced to C++.)

So that was my day job. In the evenings on Tuesday and Wednesday I get together with Debbi to meet her parents. They were in town on their way back from a vacation in Hawaii. Nice, eh?

As I've mentioned before, Debbi and I went to high school together, though we didn't really know each other. But her family lived in Massachusetts in the same city I did. Her mother passed away when we were in high school, and her father remarried, so it was Debbi's father and stepmother who were visiting. They seemed like nice folks, and I could see the resemblance between her father today and a photo of him when he was younger that Debbi had shown me (he looked a bit like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, actually). They're both retired and have moved to Florida, which seems to suit them (I think they're glad to be away from Boston weather).

Tuesday night we went to Ghirardelli Square for sundaes, and tonight we went to the branch of Buca di Beppo's up in the city. (Buca's, if I've never mentioned it before, is a family-style italian restaurant which is very good and serves quite large portions. They also have eclectic decor, covering their walls with myriad photos of Italians and other folks, with some emphasis on the Pope.) So we were thoroughly stuffed by the time both nights were through. Debbi's friends Lisa and Michel joined us.

Debbi says her parents like me. I think her sister Diane is chafing because she's the only one in Debbi's immediate family who hasn't met me!

So I've survived the parental introductions. Not too hard, really. I'm pretty easy-going, after all...