HN Explorer

Ask HN: Would I be crazy to learn Objective C now?

12 points by ZoFreX ↗ HN
Until I heard about Swift, I was planning to learn ObjC in Q3 this year and get involved with a cool iOS project that uses it. Now that Swift has been announced, I'm wondering if this is still a solid career move, or if Objective C is now the latin of programming languages.

Will Swift completely supersede Objective C? To someone who knows neither but is interested in iOS and OS X development, would time spent learning ObjC be time wasted?

12 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 38.4 ms ] thread
adam419
Curious about this myself. I recently begun learning Objective C past 2-3 week and am curious whether to abandon ship and move over to swift.

However I think that most Objective C learning material is still a good precursor for learning iOS in general and learning the structure of iOS apps.

Looking forward to hearing other answers.

lyinsteve
Swift is built with Objective-C interoperability in mind. All of the Objective-C Foundation classes are available in Swift, and they've done their best to mitigate the differences in software design.

However, learning Swift without first learning how the underlying Objective-C libraries work, the design patterns, the available functions, Swift-Objective-C-Interop is going to be very difficult.

I'd recommend learning Swift and Objective-C at the same time. If you learn how to do something in Swift, learn how to do it in Objective-C. Objective-C isn't going anywhere, any time soon.

andymoe
I think it's still going to be valuable to know C, Objective-C as well as Swift for iOS development work for a good while to come.
jamesjguthrie
Due to the massive amounts of tutorials, Stack Overflow questions, libraries, projects, etc. all written in/about Objective C for iOS and OS X, I personally would not start anywhere else.
dottrap
As a very long time Obj-C guy, Swift looks great and Swift looks like the future. But if you need to learn Cocoa through existing resources (books, tutorials, forums) or use/read existing code (3rd party libraries, code snippets, header files), you will need to understand Obj-C too until enough time such that everything has switched over.
jagawhowho
Learn c and/or c++ deeply. You can target apple with these yet still have freedom from apple. As well as some tricks that can't be done in the garbage collected world. Cross platform native apps to boot.
iends
How can you use C++ to write cocoa apps?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
allwein
Objective C is no more the Latin of programming languages than COBOL is. We'll be dealing with ObjC for years to come.
[dead] m0llusk
Objective C is currently the best language for programming applications on the iPhone which is the preferred communication tool for the elite. It might make more sense to ask why are you not yet proficient with Objective C?
RollAHardSix
So here's the deal. Obj C will be around for awhile. I think that's pretty clear, but given that you know nothing, and Swift just came out and will more then likely be the way of the future, why NOT take advantage and start with Swift. That's just how I see it anyways.
callmeed
If you have any plans to work on existing projects, especially in a freelance capacity, I would say definitely yes.

In fact the only scenario I'd say no is if your only plan is to build your own new apps from scratch.