Better First Exercise!

[JimLynchCodes]

Hey all!

I'm guessing the objective-c track doesn't get much love as it's now overshadowed by swift and has a somewhat peculiarly verbose syntax...

Anyway, just some thoughts from me, an exercism student wha has participated in many other tracks but have just now started the objective-c track.

1. Start the students off with stubbed out files / functions- Personally, I find it very jarring and difficult to get started when the downloaded exercise is just a test file and nothing else. In my opinion the Hello world exercise is meant to be extremely easy (ie. just enter the string "Hello, World!"). In most other tracks the exercise contains the source file the author wants you to use, and often they even have the function created already with a body that throws an error or just contains a comment saying something like, "put your code here!"

2. Hello World is too complicated. It's not the same Hello World problem that exists in every other track. The one here in the objective-c track is kind of a combination of "Hello World" and "Two Fer" as this function takes a parameter that replaces the word "World". In my opinion, having them be two separate exercises with "Hello World" being extremely simple is the better way to go.

As with all this exercism stuff, everything may change in v3- but if anyone's out there let me know what you think! ❤️

[a4z]

I totally agree, this hello world needs a tutorial on how to get started.
If you you totally new on the platform, it is not motivating or helpful at all.
I am happy that I did some other tracks before visiting the objective-c one, because if objective-c would have been my first contact with exercism, I would have never visited exercism again