Good to see
I'm a Mac developer who moved to Cocoa about three or four years ago, and has never looked back (I was using C++ before that with Carbon). It's good to see articles like this coming from a not obviously Mac-related site. As a professional developer I find Cocoa to be the most productive API (and with Xcode, toolset) I have ever used, bar none. And that' s by a considerable margin. I'd say to anyone wanting to dip their toes in the waters of Mac development: go for it. Obj-C's syntax might seem odd at first but after a while you'll appreciate its readability if not actually love it. And you can build a very functional small app (say, a complete word processor) in an hour or two which should be enough to impress the most hardened old coders. As for Java - well, it may be cross platform but (Mac) users know a Java app when they are forced to use one, so if you really want to make "proper" Mac apps, Cocoa is about the only reasonable way. I also find Java's documentation and class libraries bewilderingly complex compared to Cocoa's. Cocoa isn't perfect and has a few holes, but one of the great things about it is that plugging them is really easy (thanks to categories, among other things). I could go on... but I think I've made my point.