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Apple churns languages every few years? They kept Objective-C around for 13 years before introducing Swift, and that was a language that was widely disliked by

Apple churns languages every few years? They kept Objective-C around for 13 years before introducing Swift, and that was a language that was widely disliked by people from outside the Apple ecosystem. You can still use it for the vast majority of OS features today[0], nearly 20 years after it was first used on Apple platforms. Heck, Obj-C is used for Mac/iOS development because that was the preferred language for Mac OS X's immediate ancestor, NextSTEP, which means that it's been a part of the same development ecosystem for about 30 years. If this is churn, I think I'm okay with it. [0] As far as I know, the only system feature that requires Swift is iOS 14/macOS 11's new widgets, which must be written in SwiftUI.

pjmlp 6y ago
Although I agree with your post, I still remember the Object Pascal, C++ PowerPlant/Carbon and Java Bridge days.
grey-area 6y ago
Next is not MacOS so I think it’s a real stretch to claim that means long term support! Perhaps some of this is normal but I think Apple have made little effort to avoid churn and it suits them to keep things changing. Apple have had significant churn in dev tooling, languages, sdks, frameworks, chip architectures over the last couple of decades. Perhaps that is completely normal but it does mean developers are always struggling to keep up, and an app written for iOS 1.0 needs significant alterations if not a rewrite to work with later versions. Almost everything has been completely replaced, from language to frameworks to dev tooling like resources.