Thursday, May 13, 2021

An Appreciation of Objective-C

Ken Kocienda (tweet):

Over the next fifteen years, I wrote code in ObjC just about every day. The language offered me a small collection of rules on the surface and a deep well of flexibility underneath. This combination facilitated and encouraged quick and playful experimentation. The language allowed me to wink and say, “I know what I’m doing.” ObjC winked back and became a willing participant in helping me make computers do cool stuff.

[…]

It remains one of the best languages ever for creating apps and frameworks. I’ve loved every minute I’ve spent coding in it.

I learned Objective-C around the same time and identify with what he’s saying. But I really like Swift, too, and prefer it in most cases. I think that my Swift code is more reliable and easier to read. These days it’s mostly not the Swift language that gets in my way, but the slow and unreliable tooling.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter

I remain committed to developing in Objective-C. Swift is hard to write and hard to read, compared to Objective-C. It's just not a very good language, at least for me.

"These days it’s mostly not the Swift language that gets in my way, but the slow and unreliable tooling."

This is something that I find incongruous considering that the Swift language originated from the guy/team who improved the speed and reliability of the toolchain on Mac OS X.

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