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Ask Slashdot: Swift Or Objective-C As New iOS Developer's 1st Language?
macs4all (973270) writes "I am an experienced C and Assembler Embedded Developer who is contemplating for the first time beginning an iOS App Project. Although I am well-versed in C, I have thus-far avoided C++, C# and Java, and have only briefly dabbled in Obj-C. Now that there are two possibilities for doing iOS Development, which would you suggest that I learn, at least at first? And is Swift even far-enough along to use as the basis for an entire app's development?
My goal is the fastest and easiest way to market for this project; not to start a career as a mobile developer. Another thing that might influence the decision: If/when I decide to port my iOS App to Android (and/or Windows Phone), would either of the above be an easier port; or are, for example, Dalvick and the Android APIs different enough from Swift/Obj-C and CocoaTouch that any 'port' is essentially a re-write?"
Learning the language itself is not that difficult. Learning the SDK and how things work in Cocoa-land is the important part.
For example, if you need to display a list of of items in a list, an UITableView will work the same regardless of your language choice. You will still need to understand the idiosyncrasies of working with UITableViewDelegate and UITableViewDataSource.
I would stick to Objective-C for the moment as there are more learning resources online.
Unlike our previous poster, though My opinion is that Java, is actually one of the least useful languages out there. It doesn't provide a higher level syntax than objC or C++, like the "better languages" Ruby, Python, etc.
Java doesn't provide a higher level syntax than C++/Obj-C but it does provide a much more easily parsed syntax. The result is lightning fast compilation, sane compilation errors and excellent tooling support. Auto-completion, powerfull refactoring, background compilation and powerful lint tools make for a very productive programming environment. Even C# doesn't have full proper background compilation yet. Intellisense is close but there are whole classes of compile time errors that it doesn't pick up.
Similarly stability has done a lot for the language. Java is one of the few languages were I'm confident that I could build a project I wrote ten years ago with no issues. C++ on the other hand... ugh! Just last week I shifted a project from VS2012 to VS2013 and had spend an afternoon fixing random code breakage because MS broke their Chrono libraries and their retarded compiler gave errors in the template definition in their header file rather than the actual lines breaking compilation. Not to mention the ball of fun that was trying to get the latest versions of our dependencies to compile... Fun stuff like the 64bit build for some reason produced 32bit obj files... In Java land I add a line to Maven or for Android drop a library in the libs file and add it to the dependencies... Presto, nothing more to think about.
It's also a very readable proramming language imo. Packages=directories and one public class per file make navigating Java code very easy. Types are obvious and code is simple to follow. I've worked in C++,Java,C#,Javascript,Python and also on my own time in C and Haskell. Out of those I'd say Java and C# easily have the best readability. (For the record Haskell has the worst by far imo.)
It is bound by a runtime, that is meant to make it run-anywhere. Yet ironically the universal crown is going to javascript+HTML5, not java.
I'm not sure if that is ironic. The Java runtime brings other benefits than cross platform compatibility. If I dereference a null pointer or use an index outside of array bounds, the Java runtime will give me a nice error telling me exactly what the error was, which line of code in which class caused it and what the sequence of calls that lead to the error was. Try doing the same thing in C++/Obj-C. If you're lucky the code will be running on a developer machine and you can hook in the debugger and if the code isn't too heavily optimized maybe even get the line of code it occured on. If you're unlucky the code is on a production server/client system somewhere and your stuck trawling through a log to find the error. (For the record record Haskell easily takes the title of hardest to debug language thanks to lazy evaluation.)
Plus it's not like C++/ObjC have no runtime. For example, if you don't have the right VC++ redistributable installed, you'll get nowhere trying to run C++ application compiled in VC++. Their runtime just doesn't include a JIT compilation stage (for better or worse)
Anyway here's the tl;dr: Java doesn't have exciting language features but it does have excellent tooling, excellent readability and is one of the easiest languages out their to debug. That too me is way more valuable than exciting language features. I prefer C# but I'm happy to work in Java instead.