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

Pretty quickly

[SuperKendall]

Apple has done great job of interoperability with Objective-C, making it pretty easy to write new code or port small portions of an existing program...

They've even gone so far as to add improvements to Objective-C which are nice, but whose primary reason for existing is that Objective-C code is even easier (and better typed) when accessed from Swift.

At this point there's no reason not to do anything new in Objective-C, and port what you can when it makes sense.

Re:Pretty quickly

[Darinbob]

Objective-C though seemed relegated to a very tiny number of systems. Not as tiny as C# of course. Overall a lot of things start feeling like the 1970s all over again, with each major player having their own language, so choice of favorite language coincides with choice of favorite system. I much prefer cross-system languages.

Which is better?

[Locke2005]

I'm not an iOS programmer, which generates more efficient executables?

Consider all efficiencies

[SuperKendall]

At this point the executables are about the same speed between Objective-C and Swift. In reality since anything even remotely heavy you'd be doing will probably use some library or frameworks like Accelerate it hardly matters.

What does matter though is programmer efficiency, and Swift is pretty useful there. It eliminates a lot of boilerplate or repetitive code, which makes for cleaner looking code all around that is easier to maintain and understand what you were trying to do later.

Lots of Swift educational materials have done a good job of keeping up with Swift but be aware it's still changing - make sure anything you look into covers at least Swift2.

More of an issue about how bad Objective-C is

[BenJeremy]

...than about how good Swift is. Swift is an improvement over Objective-C, but that isn't saying much, and quick adoption also says more about developers fears that Apple will deprecate Objective-C from new iterations of its X-Code and force everybody to use Swift moving forward to new Apple Operating Systems.

The world didn't need more languages. Developers write millions of lines of code for open-source libraries in multi-platform languages, and Apple and Google get into a dick-waving contest with these languages that add little, if anything, to their corner of the programming world.

I'm not sure what the right answer is, but it won't be found in a niche language whose sole purpose is to support one company's ecosystem and lock in developers to their platforms.

what a sec

[iggymanz]

objective c plummets but swift only crawls up a couple notches but is still way down the list. sounds more like a lot of Apple device developers fled to something else for a living