Objective-C Enters Top Ten In Language Popularity

bonch writes "Objective-C has entered the top 10 of the Tiobe Programming Community Index. Last year, it was at #39. The huge jump is attributed to its use in iPhone and iPad development. C, of which Objective-C is a strict superset, has reclaimed the #1 spot from Java, which slides to #2. Tiobe also explains how it determines its rankings."

Comments

What language for business logic?

[tepples]

There is one popular computing platform that requires all programs to be written in Objective-C. There is another popular computing platform that requires all programs to be written in one of the many languages that compile to verifiably type-safe CLR bytecode, but Objective-C is not one of those languages. So if I want to develop an application for both of these platforms, in what language should I express the business logic of the application so that it can be automatically translated into Objective-C and into a CLR-friendly language?

Re:What language for business logic?

[TheRaven64]

No you can't. Well, you can (in theory, except that back end is painfully buggy), but you also need to use Clang and LLVM to compile an Objective-C runtime for the CLR. You can't compile the Apple one, because it contains per-platform assembly for the message sending, but you can (in theory) compile the GNU one, which is portable. You then end up running one object model on top of another object model, with two conflicting memory models. If anything nontrivial works, you deserve a prize.

(I am the maintainer of the GNUstep Objective-C 2 runtime and the author of the GNU runtime support and a few other bits of Objective-C in Clang).

Re:Dinosour language

[yerM)M]

all the calls to methods as well as accesses to class properties are interpreted

.

It's also not quite true. Objective-c message passing is quite fast, only 4x the cost of a virtual table call in C++. If you are really interested in what happens behind the scene, see obj-c fast-path

Now, namespaces are still a honking good idea.

Because it buys you speed in development

[SuperKendall]

I've never understood why Apple has such an obsession with Objective C. To me it really does seem like being different for the sake of being different.

After you use it for a while it grows on you substantially.

It's simply a different path than other languages have chosen, but it has a lot of power - like KVC observing of property changes on objects, or the way I can use categories to extend libraries I don't have code for.

And hands down Interface Builder is the most usable GUI development tool I have ever used, which stems directly from how Objective-C interacts with objects. In every other language I ended up abandoning GUI design tools to code UI by hand, but IB is a major partner in every iPhone/Mac UI I write.

Yes the syntax is verbose but so what? Modern editors (like XCode) code complete a lot of that typing for you. And in any programming, the actual coding is small compared to thinking about approaches to a problem - so in the end it's not that much different time-wise to actually produce working code.

On top of that though, I think there's an overall savings in time with really well thought out foundation libraries and language abilities that lead to faster coding over many other languages.

I've used a number of other languages really heavily, from Java to C++ to Scheme - and I think Objective-C in the end, is a really good language combined with very good tools from Apple.

I've never really seen the point in pining for other languages that do not philosophically match the platform you are targeting. When I was doing some Windows development I used C++ and the MFC. And though I could use other languages targeting the Mac or iPhone, I never much saw the point in doing so when learning the languages the core foundation libraries were written for gives you an insight into how they are likely built and meant to be used.