Ask Slashdot: Objective C Vs. Swift For a New iOS Developer?

RegularDave writes: I'm a recent grad from a master's program in a potentially worthless social science field, and I've considered getting into iOS development. Several of my friends who were in similar situations after grad school have done so and are making a healthy living getting contract work. Although they had CS and Physics degrees going into iOS, neither had worked in objective C and both essentially went through a crash courses (either self-taught or through intensive classes) in order to get their first gigs. I have two questions. First, am I an idiot for thinking I can teach myself either objective C or Swift on my own without any academic CS background (I've tinkered in HTML, CSS, and C classes online with some success)? Second, if I'm not an idiot for attempting to learn either language, which should I concentrate on?

Comments

Further reading

[pushing-robot]

There's a site you may not know about which had a long discussion on this very subject not so very long ago. A lot of people weighed in and you may find it enlightening:

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/...

No idiot.Go with ObjC

[Henriok]

You are not an idiot for going for this. There's a vibrant market out there for products based on these languages, with a great community and it serves at least two plattforms which by all accounts won't be going away anytime soon. I would go for Objective C, since it's a more mature language, with lots of good documentation, learning materials, and all the frameworks in iOS and OSX is using this. Swift is still finding it's way.. so while you are learning ObjC, Swift will mature, and you will be established when the time comes for Swift. Let the bleeding edge developers work out the kinks first.

Depends...

[dagamer34]

Depends on your goals, really. I think a big pitfall most people think is that the goal is to learn a language, when you really should be aiming to learn confidently learn as many as possible. You'll soon start to see how similar they are, and it becomes a lot easier to pick up.

The hard part actually isn't learning a language, but a framework. Frameworks are very platform specific, concepts are less reusable. And because Cocoa Touch is so intimately designed around Objective-C, even if you chose to learn Swift first, you'll need to know Objective-C anyway because of a) the amount of code/books/resources that exists on the internet in Obj-C vs Swift and b) a solution to your problem may only be written in Objective-C in a StackOverflow search result.

As for skipping academic CS, at some point you need to learn the stuff that almost every CS grad is expected to know at some level (data structures/algorithms, operating systems I & II, algorithm complexity (aka Big O notation), software design, etc...) not so much because they'll be explicitly required of you, but as you build larger and more complex apps, without them, code readability, maintainability, and performance are going to go to total shit. Granted, there are some, heck many, CS grads who somehow evade actually knowing this stuff, and things don't turn out so great for the code they write in the end.

My advice, tackle building an iOS app with a goal in mind, written in Objective-C due to the sheer number of resources out there, then expand from there.

iOS is free to play with also

[SuperKendall]

one of the advantages of Android that I haven't seen anyone mention is that you don't need to know C or C++ or ObjectiveC/ObjectionableC. Just a subset of Java

I was a Java developer for around a decade. Now I've been doing iOS development full time for several years, most with ObjC and recently in Swift.

The thing is, from a language standpoint all of those are comparable in terms of effort to learn - so if he doesn't know Java it's no harder to pick up ObjC over Java, or Swift over Java (and Swift has the advantage of being a lot lees verbose than the Java or ObjC, while still maintaining the good descriptive aspects of ObjC [named arguments]).

The real effort is in learning the frameworks for whatever system you are developing for, Java was actually the first platform I know of where that mattered more than the language because the frameworks were extensive - but so are the iOS frameworks.

As a bonus, you can develop for free on any laptop.

You can with iOS/Swift also, the simulator is very good and you could realistically write an entire app ready to ship to the store then pay for a dev license only when you felt you had something worth using.

What you gloss over is that with Android development you often NEED to have a device to develop, because the Android simulators are so poor/slow. If he doesn't already have an Android device where is that $100 advantage? Gone, and more than gone because to buy a reasonable test device (or several test devices which is more realistic) is going to cost way more than $100... I have an Android device I bought when abroad for around 70 EU, that is utterly worthless for development or even running apps.

Maybe you'll decide that, until you get that sorted out, you want to take a (probably low-paying, but with your degree, who knows where that will lead) job at some humanitarian organization

Which will have even worse politics going on than in a normal company, and probably be very draining for the soul... those are the kinds of places you want to volunteer for, not work for. They will eat you up rather than giving you the uplifting you speak of. Have you really worked for one or does it just seem like a good idea?

you don't have to worry too much about this

iOS developers have not had to worry about THAT because we have THIS.

Which is Infinitely better than having to research the dreaded other thing because your app just locks up at times...

Seriously, have not had to look for leaks in years.

it will give you the basics of OOP

Swift will give you the basics of OOP *and* functional programming, which is far more valuable going forward. And it's much more interactive since you can use Playgrounds to explore.

The demand for Java developers is either for people who know the Android frameworks really well, or incredibly seasoned IT developers with years of service experience. A few weeks of learning Java will be of little use in finding a job anywhere.