Objective-C Feature Request

Objective-C, particularly after it became 2.0, is my favourite language. It's partly because of the language itself, but I guess mostly because of the libraries. The Cocoa libraries are awesome.

For the most part. No software is perfect, and even in Cocoa there are things that could be improved. One thing that continue to trip me up is one of NSDictionary's initialiser methods.

Dear Apple,

The dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys: always end up confusing me, as the arguments always seem in the wrong order. It would make much more sense to have the method dictionaryWithKeysAndObjects: where you specified a list of key/value pairs, rather than value/key pairs.

Yours Sincerely,

Stig

Here's a random sample of the above from the Adium source code. Honestly. I grabbed the first sample from it I could find. I did not hunt for a particularly egregious example:

NSDictionary *userInfo = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
    [NSValue valueWithPointer:SecKeychainLockAll],
        AIKEYCHAIN_ERROR_USERINFO_SECURITYFUNCTION,
    @"SecKeychainLockAll",
        AIKEYCHAIN_ERROR_USERINFO_SECURITYFUNCTIONNAME,
    AI_LOCALIZED_SECURITY_ERROR_DESCRIPTION(err),
        AIKEYCHAIN_ERROR_USERINFO_ERRORDESCRIPTION,
    nil];

Doesn't that make a lot more sense like this?

NSDictionary *userInfo = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithKeysAndObjects:
    AIKEYCHAIN_ERROR_USERINFO_SECURITYFUNCTION,
        [NSValue valueWithPointer:SecKeychainLockAll],
    AIKEYCHAIN_ERROR_USERINFO_SECURITYFUNCTIONNAME,
        @"SecKeychainLockAll",
    AIKEYCHAIN_ERROR_USERINFO_ERRORDESCRIPTION,
        AI_LOCALIZED_SECURITY_ERROR_DESCRIPTION(err),
    nil];

This has confused me so many times now that I have filed a feature request with Apple (<rdar://problem/6171269>) to have a new method with the arguments in the "right" order. (Wondering if that URL is broken? Read about how rdar URLs only work for Apple.) Here's to hoping that they honour it and put it in Snow Leopard…