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Apple used to be the sponsor of Objective C for a long time. Was Apple's focus on Swift prompting this? From his documentation page: > About mulle-objc > When

Apple used to be the sponsor of Objective C for a long time. Was Apple's focus on Swift prompting this? From his documentation page: > About mulle-objc > When I wrote the Optimizing Objective-C Article Series, Objective-C had pretty much weathered its first hostile obsolesence attempt by Java. Now a decade later, it looks like the time has come, that I have to save Objective-C - at least for myself.

pjmlp 10y ago
Apple is pretty open that they plan to use Swift to replace C and Objective-C on their stack. https://developer.apple.com/swift/ https://developer.apple.com/swift/ "Swift is a successor to both the C and Objective-C languages." Of course this is something that will not happen overnight and the language is still has some corners to fine tune. Objective-C improved a lot since the NeXT days, but the C part is still there, regardless of the safety improvements it got on top. Also since Swift has been announced, the only language improvements Objective-C got were related to improving the interoperability between both languages. So I imagine some devs that are passionate about Objective-C might not like the day Objective-C joins Carbon and MPW. I surely did not like when that hapenned to Object Pascal, Mac Common Lisp or Dylan.
- groovy2shoes 10y ago
  > I surely did not like when that hapenned to Object Pascal, Mac Common Lisp or Dylan. The difference here being that Objective-C is unsafe, and its relatively low level of abstraction in comparison to the aforementioned languages, make it less than ideal as an applications language, especially compared to those languages. As you say, "the C part is still there". I'm with you. I want to be using safer languages, both because there is inherent value in safety, and because safety tends to come with more and better tools for building abstractions. While I lament the loss of Obj-Pas, MCL, and Dylan, I whole-heartedly welcome the arrival of Swift. Even if it means nothing to me directly anymore as an apostate of the Apple platform, I hope that it will fuel a push for better, safer languages across the board. In many ways, I think technologies like MCL and Dylan were victims of being ahead of their time. These are exciting times to live in as a programming language geek/snob, as the lessons of the past are finally rediscovered, absorbed, and made practical, popular, and cool :)
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Fully agree with you.

pjmlp 10y ago

Apple is pretty open that they plan to use Swift to replace C and Objective-C on their stack. https://developer.apple.com/swift/ https://developer.apple.com/swift/ "Swift is a successor to both the C and Objective-C languages." Of course this is something that will not happen overnight and the language is still has some corners to fine tune. Objective-C improved a lot since the NeXT days, but the C part is still there, regardless of the safety improvements it got on top. Also since Swift has been announced, the only language improvements Objective-C got were related to improving the interoperability between both languages. So I imagine some devs that are passionate about Objective-C might not like the day Objective-C joins Carbon and MPW. I surely did not like when that hapenned to Object Pascal, Mac Common Lisp or Dylan.

groovy2shoes 10y ago
> I surely did not like when that hapenned to Object Pascal, Mac Common Lisp or Dylan. The difference here being that Objective-C is unsafe, and its relatively low level of abstraction in comparison to the aforementioned languages, make it less than ideal as an applications language, especially compared to those languages. As you say, "the C part is still there". I'm with you. I want to be using safer languages, both because there is inherent value in safety, and because safety tends to come with more and better tools for building abstractions. While I lament the loss of Obj-Pas, MCL, and Dylan, I whole-heartedly welcome the arrival of Swift. Even if it means nothing to me directly anymore as an apostate of the Apple platform, I hope that it will fuel a push for better, safer languages across the board. In many ways, I think technologies like MCL and Dylan were victims of being ahead of their time. These are exciting times to live in as a programming language geek/snob, as the lessons of the past are finally rediscovered, absorbed, and made practical, popular, and cool :)
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Fully agree with you.