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

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.

1 vote for objective-C

[mwvdlee]

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.

Re:You're Never an Idiot

[pushing-robot]

Except homeopathy.

Swift

[Schnapple]

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.