Slashdot Mirror
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?
You don't need a professor to teach you how to program. Most of us who started using computers in the 70's and 80's were hobbyists, and we were self taught before going to college for CS. I don't use either one, so I'm not an expert, but in the immortal words of Yogi Berra - "when you come to a fork in the road, take it".
It will only take you 20-30 hours each to learn the basics of the language, so try both, and at some point you'll gravitate towards one.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
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/...
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
For wanting to learn something.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
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.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
It's better to try and fail than never try at all.
But since you have very little experience programming in any language, you're going to have to do a lot of learning and you're going to have to get a lot of help.
Objective-C has been around a lot longer; there will be more people available to help and there will be more books, tutorials and example code.
Considering there is a large and valuable legacy code base, it's going to be around for quite some time to come.
Languages aren't that difficult to switch, assuming you're familiar with the paradigm (procedural, object-oriented, functional).
API's are the hard part, but they'll be pretty similar between Objective-C and Swift.
By the time you're proficient with Objective-C, switching to Swift (if necessary) should take just a couple of months at the very worst.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I agree, as long as you pick up some guides or literature focusing on best practices, rather than just the semantics of the code. There are just toooo many "self-taught" programmers who cannot write professional quality code in a team environment because they were never really exposed to doing it properly. It's perfectly fine to teach yourself - just try to be flexible and adaptable and not get stuck in horrible bad habits - and for god sakes, if someone says you're doing it wrong, at least consider what they have to say.
For reference, no, they don't actually do a bunch of copying between objects, they just abstract pointers behind pass-by-reference semantics. Swift even takes this one step further, and for structs/enums (which, like C, are pass-by-value), it implements pass-by-value using copy on write, so it in fact does even fewer copies than a C program would (without the programmer jumping through hoops to implement copy on write himself).
There usually *are* more inefficiencies in high level languages (usually due to the fact that they do more small heap allocations), but the one you identified is not accurate.
I would suggest going with Swift.
The problem is not so much learning the language. You need to learn how to solve certain types of problems and there is a lot of background knowledge you will need. You also need a way of thinking, the Tao of the Programmer.
My biggest suggestion is that you do not sit around or even shop around looking for 'gigs' but rather start creating stuff.
Good luck.
As far as I can tell, Swift is just a new front-end to the Objective-C object system. So knowing how Objective-C works will be beneficial to working in Swift.
Also most of the libraries and frameworks you will be working with are Objective-C and most of the current tutorials and online resources probably use Objective-C in their examples. That's not to say you need to start with ObjC, but be prepared as you use Swift to learn a bit about it, at least enough to read and translate example snippets you see.
If my understanding of Swift is accurate, one can intermingle Swing and ObjC libraries and modules. They should have the exact same calling convention and object semantics. Perhaps Swift is easier to remember without some of the more unusual aspects of ObjC's syntax.
I would learn objective-c first because you can get more help with it. People all over the internet have been doing it for a long time. It won't be obsolete for at least a decade, so don't stress about swift being the new way to do the same things. Find tutorials online or get torrents of books/buy them. Dream up your own micro-projects, when you get stuck http://stackoverflow.com/ is your friend. This site has saved me MANY times, usually within minutes. take a look at other peoples micro-projects and full fledged ones on https://github.com/ but above all, right some code EVERYDAY.
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.
I've been doing Obj-C for a few years now and I'm using Swift in a new project.
Swift all the way, mainly because Swift is just a much nicer language. Obj-C has a bizarre late 80's syntax which is not found anywhere else so it's very strange. Except for random places where it's not. There was a half-assed "Objective-C 2.0" which introduced dot notation but not everywhere or consistently. There's tons of things you can do with it that are unsafe and shouldn't work (found out a lot in translating some Obj-C code to Swift)
There's still going to be a bunch of Cocoa stuff to mess with (i.e., there's no intrinsic date concept so you have to mess with NSDate) but at this point learning Objective-C is a waste of time. At best you will have a few more online resources to consult with versus Swift but Swift is the biggest new language in a long time - a language designed by the biggest company on earth for one of the most popular platforms on the planet. The uptake is more or less unprecedented.
Anyone who prefers Obj-C just doesn't want to learn something new. Apple didn't invent a new language because of hipness reasons, they did it because their platforms are saddled with this shitty language which is missing modern conventions and is difficult to learn and use.
Just use Swift.
Schnapple
Practical professional stuff to learn about: design patterns, refactoring and test-driven development. Start learning this stuff as soon as possible otherwise you'll make all kinds of awful mistakes when your doing your first professional gigs (assuming you get to that point).
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
It won't take you too long to learn how to write crappy code in either language. What you really need is a place to work that has focused goals, a clear set of programming guidelines that are built around writing code that others can read later, and the sitzfleisch to do the work.
Find a job with a boss who is passionate about his/her work and are demanding enough to make you want to do a good job. There is no quick rich scheme in the next couple of months, programming quality apps is about art as well as science, and both take a lot of effort.
But I promise you, your education isn't worthless, there may be unrealized benefits awaiting your team if you are willing to work at their level.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Best course I took at university was assembly on a simulated CPU which showed me exactly what was going on when I issuing commands. Made me realize what was happening down in lower levels. While I don't touch assembly at all anymore (and never did after that course) the way it made me think about how the computer works definitely turned me into a better developer today. For a very basic example, because I had the experience with the simulator and saw what happened with function calls it's easy to explain why a factorial implementation that uses recursion will be slower than one that just uses a loop.
The noob has a problem with obj c: everybody in the world is already good at it. At least with swift, everybody is a noob and w six months of work you already know more that most. Also I highly recommend classes as a supplement to independent learning.
Definitely Objective-C, unless your intent are for small home projects no one else will ever have to deal with.
Here is a bunch of random notes I took when evaluating Swift...
- No header files confuscate passed-on intended usage by exposing ALL class details rather than the intended consumable APIs.
Q: Is there any private/public scoping in the language?
A: None! It's wide open. Apple promised at the WWDC to fix that. But it will probably take the form of private/protected keywords much like C++ in the class definition. They seem hard-bent on not having public header files.
- Access Control
In Xcode 6 beta 4, Swift adds support for access control. This gives you complete control over what part of the code is accessible within a single file, available across your project, or made public as API for anyone that imports your framework. The three access levels included in this release are:
private entities are available only from within the source file where they are defined.
Internal entities are available to the entire module that includes the definition (e.g. an app or framework target).
public entities are intended for use as API, and can be accessed by any file that imports the module, e.g. as a framework used in several of your projects.
Ie: public class ListItem { // Public properties. public var text: String public var isComplete: Bool
}
Problem with that is regardless of access control, you are still exposing your entire class code and layout to users of it, preventing any restriction on class access for "consumable non-internal" implementations.
- optional means object can be nil. But they're just a wrapper.
Real-world test code being written showed you end up peppering your code with ? and ! symbols.
Using ! unwraps a var to it's value. CHECK FOR NIL or use if let
Ig target.foo?() unwraps to if [target respondsToSelector(foo)] target.foo()
-weak reference need to be optional
-Swift "module" import uses the project group name; change a file from group and suddenly is out of the module
-AnyObject = id or Class type
Can't upcast AnyObject to a static type
wrong: var view: NSView = anyObject
need to upcast using as
var view: NSView = anyObject as NSView
or tested
var view: NSView = anyObject as? NSView
- Arrays upcast arrays: for item in myItems as NSButton[]
Your code end up having full of "as othertype" in it. So much for inferred type.
Random bridging nastiness:
-NSError** gets magically translated as NSErrorPointer
and you still need to pass by reference: &error
and then receiver must unroll pointer using !
- useless notations like optionals:
foo?.prop?.prop?.prop.ToInt()
vs foo.prop.prop.prop.intValue;
Saved nothing. Obj-C can already handling nil object dereferencing
- Integration with existing code: Obj-C require Swift mangled name
SWIFT_CLASS("_TC5MyApp10MyDocument")
-STL-style templates
@objc func myGeneric(x:T)-> (String,String) {} ensures
func can be expressed in Obj-C at compile type
Need I say more?
- Specify obj-c accessor:
var enabled : bool
{
@objc(isEnabled) get {...}
}
further obfuscate the .swift file (remember: NO HEADERS!)
- Swift does not fix the CF bridging issue
Unmanaged for manual memory management. ie
let color = CGColorGetRandomColor().takeUnretainedValue()
Force the memory convention by annotating the header
CF_IMPLICIT_BRIDGING_ENABLED() //header content
CF_IMPLICIT_BRIDGING_DISABLED()
- String-types enums are a major fubar
Given
enum Method : String
{
case GET = "GET"
case POST = "POST"
case DELETE = "DELETE"
case PUT = "PUT"
case PATCH
HR will still demand five years of experience in Swift.
Objective C will be dropped in the future. Once Apple says "This is the way to go," it *will* drop the old one sooner rather than later. Carbon, Rosetta, and WebObjects are examples of previous technologies that Apple has killed off.
You can't realistically do iOS development without knowing Objective-C; its just no feasible since all Apples frameworks are written in it, all the open source libraries use it, and all of the stackflow answers are for it. And fortunately, it is not a bad language. Swift is a much better language, at least potentially. It is still a bit rough to use. But it is sure to replace Objective-C over the next few years, so you would be a fool to ignore it. To address the larger question - you should get some formal computer science instruction if you ever expect to land a job. You have to have something on your résumé.
2) In this case, the first thing you need to learn is this: Fuck Slashdot.
I thought Slashdot BETA already took care of that :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You're basically using all the Cocoa classes, just with a bunch of extra wrapper code
You are using the frameworks directly. There is no "wrapper code". How the API's look to swift has been refined, but there on no layers over said API's...
in a language that's slower than Objective-C
An explicit goal of Swift is performance, and it's already faster than Objective-C when optimized.
for little real benefit beyond syntactic sugar
I'm sorry, how are Tuples mere syntactic sugar over ObjC? Or operator overloading?
That's either a hell of a lot of sugar, or a new dish.
The fact is that Swift is a truly new language that brings a lot of functional programming concepts into play for iOS development.
Worse, as things stand right now, if you start out using Swift, you're going to quickly start running into walls where the introductory documentation you need just doesn't exist yet.
What intro documents are those exactly? Apple has two free books on Swift, there are countless "getting started with Swift" resources online, there are also many books either out or just about to be published.
Point at one aspect of iOS development that has no Swift documentation. Just one.
learning Swift requires a fair degree of masochism right now
That was true a month or two after Swift launched, but is not at all true now.
You simply have no concept of the speed of uptake Swift has had in the realm of the most serious iOS developers, who have already suffered the slings and arrows of misfortune and have draw everyone else a nice map of where to go based on experience...
So no, new developers to the platform should definitely start by learning Objective-C
I've been programming only for iOS since before the App Store was launched, and worked on scores of real world applications. Have you?
My advice is 100% the opposite of yours, because Swift offers so many benefits to someone new to either ObjC or Swift and Apple has clearly moved to make Swift the primary development language going forward.
In two or three years, assuming Apple doesn't drop Swift like they did their last three or four scripting language bridges
And I'll leave you with that dangling statement for the ages... *facepalm*
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No header files confuscate passed-on intended usage by exposing ALL class details rather than the intended consumable APIs.
Which is OK within the same app, especially since you can mark methods as private now.
Visibility is limited to what you can use when using a framework written in swift, you get what is essentially an automatic header view.
The idea is to write more small frameworks for more modularity.
Real-world test code being written showed you end up peppering your code with ? and ! symbols.
Not as true since the iOS frameworks were re-worked to indicate properly to Swift when something is an optional or not. The choice to use an optional should be a thoughtful one in your own code.
var view: NSView = anyObject as NSView
What's wrong with being explicit in casting? You had to do that a lot in ObjC also ( NSView view = (NSView *)myObject ) only now without the pointer syntax... as the tested casting is a much nicer concept since it fails gracefully if wrong, instead of just proceeding and crashing.
Your code end up having full of "as othertype" in it.
No, it really hasn't, not in real use.
Integration with existing code: Obj-C require Swift mangled name
Don't know where you got that, but just no. I've worked with mixed Swift/ObjC code, there is no need to use the mangled name - that has not come up in any way for real use.
String-types enums are a major fubar
Oh no, you have to call toRaw()? Never mind that in ObjC enums can ONLY be integers, not strings at all, which means you have to write a whole method somewhere to translate those ints into strings if you want an enum of strings, and also figure out where that method belongs... enums in Swift are a HUGE advancement.
The localized strings would thus expose the structure layout
Now that's just plain silly given that format strings in ObjC are simply passed the various objects in the call to format, and structure discerned from those pass parameters every bit as easily.
In fact what is REALLY silly is that ObjC is way more hackable, since it's all message passing... Swift takes that aspect away unless you re-enable it with things you mentioned like explicitly enabling KVC for methods.
I created a REST/JSON multi-threaded transaction framework with full JSON object parsing through an object factory that returned fully instantiated objects
That's interesting but sounds dubious since all of the JSON parsing Swift code I've seen is really compact, and I've been dealign with a lot of REST/JSON code in a production app myself, using swift. It's smaller. I've not measured speed but it's not much slower, if any.
Of course is real life you are just using NSJSONSerializer, right? Right?
That test framework was built with a multi-programmer, globally-spread coding team such as what I have to deal with at the office
I have to deal with the same stuff all the time, I'm a full time iOS consultant who has worked with a number of very large teams. I like the idea of a more modular app with more internal frameworks myself, it will REALLY help in a case like that.
I really think you are greatly mistaken about swift, you should use it in real development and not just a test case. Swift has already seen a lot of advancement and uptake...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No one's going to run a high availability web server, database or number-cruncher on a mobile.
Yes in fact they do. In fact if you stopped to think about it, all aspects of mobile computing correlate strongly to "high availability" concepts because the user wants an application that works fluidly, with as little delay or error as possible, and because it's a small portable device always with them, is less tolerant of said delay/error than with a desktop where we are all used to applications being slow at times.
Also of course, many mobile apps are simply arms of a larger system that is considered a high availability system, so the applications by default fall under that umbrella.
I've worked on mobile applications that have very large datasets, or a tremendous amount of processing of data from a server... it's not that uncommon.
Lag due to an algorithmic choice would be an even more unlikely occurrence
You are SO naive. That is in fact a HUGE problem for new developers on mobile platforms, something I have helped correct for many times, making a HUGE difference in how an application responds to the user. Any number of times it has been the difference between a feature even being possible on a mobile device.
A programmer will always be better with a solid grounding in CS, obviously; but your argument is misdirected.
Sorry if I only speak with several years of real world mobile development behind me, including some J2ME work in the past...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
an offtopic thought on this... you describe your degree as "potentially worthless". I can see in your posts the frustration and the urgency in landing a job. But before giving up on your degree, I urge you to take a longer view. First off, the science of public policy is basically the study of governance, what has worked well and what has gone horribly wrong. This knowledge is urgently needed today more than ever. Further, without public policy experts, the govt would be run by plutocrats and warmongers (even more-so than today), and the ranks of govt agencies would be be filled with patronage toadies and syncophants. You must have chosen the grad program because you had a passion for the topic; please don't give up now when your knowledge can have a great impact.
second, jobs suck and job searches suck. I was in a similar boat, coming out of a graduate program with a somewhat specialized degree. Some suggestions based on my own learnings and failings:
* general HR job posting are not a big win. This is a hard way for somebody with a specialized degree to find something that's a good fit.
* lean on your classmates and alumni. Your classmate cohort, where did they end up? Recent graduates of your program, where did they end up and how did they get their jobs?
* informational interviews. These are awesome. its where you schedule a call with somebody not to get a job or talk about a potential opening, but just to talk with them about what they do, and how they got there. Often these can lead to other networking connections.
* be prepared to move. when you're specialized, you may need to move to where is the epicenter for your specialty. I don't know anything about public policy, but presumably DC, state capitals, etc?
Anyway, some unsolicited advice. I hate it when people give me unsolicited advice. Nosy fuckers. Best of luck.
There are some good things about the iOS ecosystem. For starters, if you require the latest iOS version, the piracy rate for apps will be at 0%. If you allow multiple iOS versions, just do a write or read outside your app's sandbox to check for a JB or not. Android has a non-zero piracy rate, but LVL and device-based APK encryption do reduce it to a dull roar.
You can still earn money as a developer. However, you can't follow the herd. If everyone is making fart apps, don't waste the time in making one.
Find a market segment and go with that. For example, Torque is an app that makes a lot of money. It isn't mainstream, but for the task at hand, it is extremely useful, and people will pay for it.
Some ideas/suggestions of what to do:
1: Make a GOOD PGP/gpg program. One that not just does the usual signing/encrypting/validating/decrypting, but uses the operating system's encryption (KeyChain) to stash the private keys. Coupled with an optional passphrase, this provides good protection.
2: Make a utility that can store files on multiple cloud providers at once. That way, if I stash documents and some sync error trashes one provider, I still have the documents saved somewhere else. If there are sync mismatches, give the user the option of using the document with the latest timestamp with saving the old one in an archive directory to be safe.
3: Create an app that is based on option #2, but also encrypts and presents itself as a WebDAV option. This way, one can use their phone as a drag and drop cloud storage device, with the app doing the backend encryption and distributed storage work.
4: A statistical analyzer similar to Minitab or SAS, but scaled down to a device.
5: A device that does TKIP/SKIP authentication like Google's Authenticator, but can use TouchID on iOS, a PIN/passphrase on iOS/Android, and can back the seeds up securely. This way, if I re-ROM my phone, I don't have to redo all my 2FA stuff... just re-import an encrypted backup and be back and running. With the option of a PIN, even if the device is stolen, one's 2FA IDs are still protected.
Learning Objective-C takes a couple of days - a week at most. Leaning the frameworks takes a lot longer. Swift has a new core library, but most of the other frameworks are the same, so the experienced programmers still has an edge.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Most people do not have a clue how to use Objective C right. What "world" is that you are talking of?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.