I programmed mainly in Objective-C from ~2000 (Rhapsody beta) and resisted even learning Swift until Apple finally confirmed they were definitely going to open-source it. So about a decade of objc.
1.) I love working in Swift. It would not occur to me to start a new project in Objective-C. The only reason I could see myself writing more objc code in this life would be to make a quick fix on some old project. (Incidentally, this is the exact same kind of B-completely-replaces-A-for-me language experience I had with JavaScript→TypeScript. Can't think of another.)
2.) Swift confers upon me a quantum-leap kind of productivity increase -- the kind of "programmer time" optimization the Ruby guys used to talk about over Java. The core language is great. Swift enums concisely solve lots of problems that are easy-but-annoying in Objective-C. Protocol extensions are an absolute godsend and I hate the feeling (when programming in something else) of seeing how a protocol extension would solve the problem at hand, but not having them.
Incidentally, I remember vividly when there was talk of adding "concrete protocols" to Objective-C 2.0. (They let you do a similar thing; adopt a protocol to gain a bunch of implementation behavior, not just declare that you support an interface). I was really, really excited about that, too. But the rumor didn't pan out and concrete protocols were never added.
3.) Yep, love it. I changed jobs in 2016 and don't even do much Apple platform development anymore; I am mainly using Swift on Linux.
My comments apply to current Swift, so right now that means 4.2. As you go back in time to older versions, I liked it less. In the first year doing Swift, there were still times I enjoyed Objective-C more, but not anymore.
Aww, it's kind of sad when I think about it; after all those years, Objective-C is now dead to me, like NewtonScript...
> Incidentally, this is the exact same kind of B-completely-replaces-A-for-me language experience I had with JavaScript→TypeScript. Can't think of another.
I had my own instance of that with Java -> Kotlin — and this is on the backend. I can’t imagine how that transition feels like on Android
> Swift enums concisely solve lots of problems that are easy-but-annoying in Objective-C.
Curious as to what those might be, can you shed some light?
I was also puzzled by the emphasis on enums in Swift, as they are a language feature I rarely if ever use in Objective-C, not because I want to and they are inadequate, but because I generally don't see much of a need for them.
Swift enums are effectively discrimated unions, which are really, really different from C (and thus, Obj-C) enums.
For example, in Swift, you can have an enum which says its values holds exactly one of:
A) several specific semantically meaningful strings
B) some other object
C) several objects
In Obj-c, you would probably express this as a single object, and write a bunch of error prone logic to handle which of these states you’re in, possibly missing an important last minute addition in one of your methods for walking over all the possible state.
In any OO language, I’d write different classes for cases A B and C that share a common message protocol (wether formal or informal) and use them uniformly/polymorphically.
1.) I love working in Swift. It would not occur to me to start a new project in Objective-C. The only reason I could see myself writing more objc code in this life would be to make a quick fix on some old project. (Incidentally, this is the exact same kind of B-completely-replaces-A-for-me language experience I had with JavaScript→TypeScript. Can't think of another.)
2.) Swift confers upon me a quantum-leap kind of productivity increase -- the kind of "programmer time" optimization the Ruby guys used to talk about over Java. The core language is great. Swift enums concisely solve lots of problems that are easy-but-annoying in Objective-C. Protocol extensions are an absolute godsend and I hate the feeling (when programming in something else) of seeing how a protocol extension would solve the problem at hand, but not having them.
Incidentally, I remember vividly when there was talk of adding "concrete protocols" to Objective-C 2.0. (They let you do a similar thing; adopt a protocol to gain a bunch of implementation behavior, not just declare that you support an interface). I was really, really excited about that, too. But the rumor didn't pan out and concrete protocols were never added.
3.) Yep, love it. I changed jobs in 2016 and don't even do much Apple platform development anymore; I am mainly using Swift on Linux.
My comments apply to current Swift, so right now that means 4.2. As you go back in time to older versions, I liked it less. In the first year doing Swift, there were still times I enjoyed Objective-C more, but not anymore.
Aww, it's kind of sad when I think about it; after all those years, Objective-C is now dead to me, like NewtonScript...