I’m sitting here at the Cocoa Heads meeting at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, and Scott Stevenson is talking about CoreData.

There are a couple of Apple employees here in the room answering questions, and from what I’m hearing, here’s my assessment of CoreData: stay the hell away from it. At least for a couple of years.

I’m surprised that people are still looking for the holy grail of data-driven applications: create them without programming. The problem is that this works for trivial applications. If you have any application that’s big enough, or popular enough that has to be maintained, these tools just don’t work.

I have yet to hear from an application built this way that’s easily maintainable…

Oh, by the way, CoreData’s NSPredicate class doesn’t support Outer Joins.