As I launch into some serious development work using Cocoa for a Mac OS X application, it reminds me of the insanity that is 21st century programming.

Sure, the word insanity is a bit strong, but honestly it is insanity. After years of innovation and advancement, developers are still required to write a pile of code in order to handle the simple act of deleting a row from a table UI element.

I am not referring to managing the underlying data. Just the act of hitting the delete key and triggering an event requires either subclassing the standard UI element supplied by the OS and writing code OR adding superfluous UI elements, linking them to a menu item which will then trigger the event.

Its insane I tell you.

Why can’t you just hook-up the UI elements “delete” outlet to the controller action you wish to have handle it?

You know like Steve-O showed in that infamous demo when OS X launched years ago?

The state of application development is still in the stone ages when programmers each recreate the wheel every single day.

No wonder Rails got the hype it did with its DontRepeatYourself approach to development.