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Objective-C Use Falls Hard, Apple's Swift On the Rise (dice.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the java-takes-back-the-crown dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes: When Apple rolled out Swift last summer, it expected its new programming language to eventually replace Objective-C, which developers have used for years to build iOS and Mac OS X apps. Thanks to Apple's huge developer ecosystem (and equally massive footprint in the world of consumer devices), Swift quickly became one of the most buzzed-about programming languages, as cited by sites such as Stack Overflow. And now, according to new data from TIOBE Software, which keeps a regularly updated index of popular programming languages, Swift might be seriously cannibalizing Objective-C. On TIOBE's latest index, Objective-C is ranked fourteenth among programming languages, a considerable drop from its third-place spot in October 2014. Swift managed to climb from nineteenth to fifteenth during the same period. "Soon after Apple announced to switch from Objective-C to Swift, Objective-C went into free fall," read TIOBE's text accompanying the data. "This month Objective-C dropped out of the TIOBE index top 10." How soon until Swift eclipses Objective-C entirely?

1 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Pretty quickly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    And Microsoft has already released a bridging product (called Bridge for iOS, no less.)

    As for OBJC, is theoretically better than C++, at least as far as how objects are represented. OBJC probably would have supplanted C++ had MacOS X replaced MacOS in 1995 instead of 2001. C++ never standardized until 1998, despite being used since 1983. That tells you quite a lot about how hard it is to learn and use. OBJC also appeared in 1983, having some inspiration from Smalltalk (and that wasn't the only thing inspired by Smalltalk, the Sierra game SCI (Sierra Creative interpreter) circa 1988 ALSO was inspired by Smalltalk.)

    Swift takes this to a more logical conclusion and removes some of the harder to understand material from what would otherwise still be OBJC.

    In comparison C# (eg C++++) is more of a watered down C++ and accomplishes some similar things Swift does with OBJC.

    So it's possible to compile C# or Swift into native code, not relying on a CLR or VM. And as long as no virtualmachine-like runtime is required on the operating system (ugh... geez the amount of runtimes on Windows) that means a software item can be packaged up and run on any operating system. The underlying GUI system is obviously not going to be the same on all operating systems.