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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?
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I just finished a Flash animation course at ITT. Am I too late to the game?
Trolling is a art,
I'm not an iOS programmer, which generates more efficient executables?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
"How soon until Swift eclipses Objective-C entirely?"
I'm guessing swiftly.
Ah, yes. Dice "insights" stating the obvious long after everyone else figured it out.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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
You realise that Apple already announced that the Swift compiler is going to be ported to linux and made open source, right?
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
It's less niche than at least two dozen programming languages /. has hyped as the best thing since sliced bread. Sometimes I feel this place has become a bunch of grumpy old farts who think C and POSIX was the pinnacle of computer science and everything since has just been poorly reinventing the wheel. Or that programming should be for real men who could hand code it in assembly and that high level languages is just another attempt to recreate COBOL or Visual Basic. There's not a whole lot of money in creating programming languages, just ask Sun. And if you don't have widespread adoption, you're never getting off the ground. That's why the OSS community is still trying to create UI apps using 1980s tech, sure Qt is a decent band aid and GTK.... well it's a band aid, but the base language is way behind Java, C# and Swift. Not in what you can theoretically do, but in terms of how easy it is to do it.
Besides, Microsoft is open sourcing .NET Core, Apple has promised to open source Swift within the end of the year, Java has of course been open a while with the OpenJDK so it seems like the days of the base language being closed source is coming to an end. Of course they all do it with their own platform in mind, but desktop Linux could use a few allies. Yes, GNOME and KDE has been at it for a very long time but have they managed to get any market share? Once a percent of nerds, nobody else.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Let me know when I can actually download and build a Swift compiler on something other than OS X, and I'll take a look at the language. Until then I'm not interested. And I'm a Mac user.
(On an unrelated note, who the fuck thought it was a good idea to use the Exit icon to indicate logging in to Slashdot?)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Let me know when they catch up with c.
Oh, wait. They never will. Because garbage collection. There's nothing so ultimately fabulous as the executable deciding to take a nice vacation in the middle of something you didn't want it to.
So never mind.
Sun controls Java.
Hi there, Mr van Winkle!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."