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

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?

Comments

Re:Pretty quickly

[SuperKendall]

Well, Swift should be cross-platform pretty shortly since they are releasing it as open source (including standard libraries) in a month or two.

Objective-C was more cross-platform than you might think, people have used it for server development in the past. Even now it's used for both really popular desktop and mobile apps, which a decent range.

Sift is nice, but not great

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using swift for a while now, overall the language is nice and is easier than objective-c.

But, there are issues.

* You still have to know ObjectiveC. Similar to other systems, like JavaScript. You can learn other languages that compile to Javascript all you want, but you should still learn JavaScript.
* Swift gets lost. You ask Swift to call func1, it calls func2. The fix is to do a Clean and recompile.
* Debugger gets lost and reverts to assembly -- as if ObjectiveC wasn't bad enough
* Error handling is still Janky as shit! You can't catch exceptions on functionality that isn't marked to throw exceptions (compiler error), so if one does come about you are 'effed and app crashes.
* Generics are not really implemented. At least not in a way that you would expect if you came from...I don't know, any other language on earth.

Re:More of an issue about how bad Objective-C is

[Anonymous Coward]

You realise that Apple already announced that the Swift compiler is going to be ported to linux and made open source, right?

No, it really is about Swift being a good language

[SuperKendall]

Objective-C was actually a very good language. Having used a lot of other languages heavily, including Java and C++ and C and Scheme and Lisp, Objective-C had a lot of great things going for it - it was verbose but once you got used to it that was nice, and the standard libraries for it were very powerful.

Swift itself is I think a really great overall language. It's pragmatic in all kinds of ways that tries to help the programmer, letting you forgo a lot of syntactical cruft. It also offers a nice array of modern programing concepts including functional programming - but does not force you to use them, so you can decide what level of functional and object oriented programing is the right mix for you - or heck, just write only functions and use it like a much nicer C variant.

The great thing is also, that with Apple heavily backing it you don't have to worry if it's worth picking up unlike lots of other nice, but small and not widely used languages.