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

From an experienced iOS developer - Learn Swift

[SuperKendall]

I've been doing iOS development full time since before the release of the Apple App Store.

At this point, anyone trying to get into iOS development should, no question, learn Swift.

Apple has indicated as clearly as they can Swift is the primary language moving forward. All of the most experienced iOS developers I know are rapidly learning swift, much new work is being done in Swift.

There's also no shortage of Swift books either available or soon to be released, and lots and lots of online courses covering swift specific stuff for people new to iOS development.

One other benefit of going with Swift is you get to use Playgrounds to dynamically play with Swift code and see what things do. There's a ton of benefit to that interactivity when learning a new system...

I would recommend starting with the 6.2 beta version of XCode (the one that was released with WatchKit support) since the current XCode in the app store can get a little crashy with some Swift code. By the time you have anything written you might want to release, 6.2 will be out of beta (sometime in January I'd guess).

ObjC is still useful to know as some philosophy behind it is embedded in the SDK - but what is useful to know will easily be learned in snippets as you go along learning iOS development, Swift is a better choice for primary language for new projects.