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Objective-C Comes of Age
New submitter IdleThoughts writes "Sometimes it takes a long time to spark a revolution. Long the ugly duckling of programming languages, iOS' Objective-C passed C# in the 'TIOBE Programming Community Index this month and seems on a trajectory to overtake C++ in the next few. It was invented in the early 1980s by Brad Cox and Tom Love, with the idea of creating 'Software Integrated Circuits' and heavily influenced by Smalltalk — yet another legacy from Xerox PARC, along with desktop GUIs, ethernet and laser printers. It was adopted early on by Steve Jobs' NeXTStep, the grand-daddy of all that is now OS X. It had to wait, however, for the mobile device revolution to have its day, being ideally suited to the limited resources on portable devices. It's still being actively developed by Apple and others, sporting the new automatic reference counting and static analysis in the Clang compiler. It turns out it has supported dynamic patching of code in applications all along. What more surprises does this venerable language have up its sleeve?"
Sad sad day. Objective-C sucks! C# rocks!
In many ways this is true, but then again, they aren't the same kind of languages. I absolutely love C# syntax and the easy readability of the code. .NET libraries are also wonderful, and in general I would rather use C# than Objective-C because of this.
But Objective-C is closer to C and C++ than C#. I would however hope that Apple brings something like C# to OS X and iOS. I would start developing with them right away.
"Even Apple's own old Dylan was a more interesting and innovative as a language than Objective-C."
Agreed. I loved the multi-interface stuff. Why doesn't anyone else pick that up? It would be particularly easy to implement in Bundles. But...
"the availability of libraries is often more important than the language itself"
Bingo. Lets be honest, is any native library set even *remotely* as good as Cocoa out of the box? With the exception of Delphi I've fiddled with them all, and the answer is a resounding "no!". All you have to do is compare the basic text editing widget across libraries and you can draw your own conclusions.