Swift Vs. Objective-C: Why the Future Favors Swift

snydeq writes: InfoWorld's Paul Solt argues that It's high time to make the switch to the more approachable, full-featured Swift for iOS and OS X app dev. He writes in Infoworld: "Programming languages don't die easily, but development shops that cling to fading paradigms do. If you're developing apps for mobile devices and you haven't investigated Swift, take note: Swift will not only supplant Objective-C when it comes to developing apps for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and devices to come, but it will also replace C for embedded programming on Apple platforms. Thanks to several key features, Swift has the potential to become the de-facto programming language for creating immersive, responsive, consumer-facing applications for years to come."

Comments

Re:Unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the day, logic design done at the big companies was done using the big companies' proprietary HDL and proprietary tools so that it would be harder for the design to be stolen, tweaked slightly, and be reproduced by a competitor.

If Apple does their system software in a proprietary language, one could apply the same thinking to argue that it would be harder to steal, tweaked slightly, and be reproduced by a competitor.

Re:Unlikely

[Trepidity]

I think a wholesale rewrite is unlikely, but I would guess that they are going to eventually do something about the GNU code they use. Apple doesn't like the GPLv3's patent clauses, so they have frozen all their imported GNU utilities at the latest GPLv2 version. Some of these are now getting quite old and not maintained upstream, so Apple has to handle even routine maintenance. They managed to transition off one big one by moving from gcc to clang/LLVM, but there is still a bunch of old GNU code shipped in the base system that I don't see them keeping forever. Now whether they rewrite it in Swift seems more questionable.

More approachable?

[Dog-Cow]

I don't know how this idea started, but only a non-programmer could think Swift is more approachable than Objective-C. Swift is way more complicated and has more fundamentals that must be understood.

let versus var
optionals, including implicit and explicit binding
differences between structs and classes (value versus reference)
generics
different ways of specifying parameters, including named and unnamed parameters
property declarations, including a multitude of shortcuts

The problem is, if you don't learn most of the syntax in all its variety, you'll have a hard time understanding any random code you come across. Learning by example helps make a language approachable.

There's some of us who've seen this before...

[mark-t]

And we know from experience that WHENEVER somebody uses terms like "language <XYZ> is the future", it is inevitably baseless speculation, and often rests on the false belief that some single programming language, or any single technology for that matter, can actually be the "best" one.

Brooks said it best, There is No Silver Bullet

Re:On iOS platforms.

[BronsCon]

This oft-quoted line of complete bullshit is why people think iOS and Apple's walled garden is more secure than any other mobile platform. The reality is that Apple gets a binary to review, just like Google, Microsoft, or Blackberry. Apple and Google actually review the binaries, even; and Google even actually catches some nasties (I'm sure Apple does, as well, but they aren't as transparent about it) and prevents them from entering the Play store. Apple has pulled malware from the iOS store in the past, but has never made any official comment on it, unlike Google, which does leave one wondering... Knowing that malware authors likely submit to both platforms at the same rate, we know how often Google rejects or removes malware from their store (because they publish the statistics), one should expect that Apple's numbers are roughly the same, but are they? If anyone has a link to some official (e.g. from Apple) stats on that, I'd love to see them.