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Why did Objective-C never catch on? (Ask Slashdot, Aug 2000)
- sohn 15y agoUnlike most of you Hacker News readers may think, Apple devices are not common out there (yes, I know, there are iPhones - yet they're too expensive and most of their applications are NOT being coded in Obj-C), so Obj-C didn't catch on yet.
- dan1234 15y ago"…and most of their applications are NOT being coded in Obj-C…" Got any sources to back that up? I've often looked for numbers for ObjC vs PhoneGap vs Titanium vs etc comparisons but I've never managed to come up with anything conclusive.
- vetinari 15y agoI think that sohn's point is not that PhoneGap/Titanium/etc are more popular than they really are, but that most iOS apps are really written in C/C++ with only thin shim to interface with iOS where necessary (think games portable to other platforms).
- rsynnott 15y agoWhich is, indeed, true for some games, particularly high-end games. However, the bulk of apps on iOS are not high-end games.
- peteretep 15y ago6 months ago, there were 250 million iOS devices had been sold - that's iOS only, no Macs. I make that one for every 28 human beings on this planet. What number would tip this so that you considered Apple devices to be common?
- VMG 15y agoTo be fair, many people own multiple iOS devices.
- sambeau 15y agoA small number of geeks and a fair number of households own more than one iOS device. Most people don't.
- estel 15y agoPerhaps, but equally most iPad owners seem to also own an iPhone.
- JadeNB 15y agoAccording to http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+cars+on+Earth http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+cars+on+Earth, there are under 700 million cars on Earth. I think a ratio of 3 cars : 1 of your product counts as its being popular, even if some people own more than one. :-)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sipefree 15y ago> most of their applications are NOT being coded in Obj-C Yeah I'm going to call bullshit on that. Bullshit.
- jopt 15y agoDo you have a source for that (iOS mostly
- rbarooah 15y agoSince you acknowledge that this is not the prevailing view, do you have any data or sources to support it?
- vellum 15y agoExtraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Apple sold around ~133 million iOS devices in 2011. How is that "not common"?
- jiggy2011 15y agoApple devices may not be the most common devices out there, but they are a very popular target for developers. Many applications developers will target iOS before they target android etc, even though the sales numbers may be higher simply because the apple store has a reputation for converting paid apps better. Therefor, any serious mobile developer probably know objective C. Not sure what you think the applications are being coded in? Sure, maybe some use cross platform toolkits but I bet the best selling apps are written in obj-C or at least by developers familiar with it.
- jwarzech 15y agoFor what its worth CNBC's 'All-America Economic Survey' (http://www.cnbc.com/id/46857053 http://www.cnbc.com/id/46857053) resulted in the conclusion that 51% of all homes in america have at least one Apple product. I would say thats starting to get pretty common (of course this is probably skewed based on the demographic reading cnbc)
- batista 15y agoNot according to sales. For example the iPad is like 90%+ of all tables sold. The iPhone has sold 100 million+. The iPod has the majority of the mp3 player market. The Mac has ~10% of the US market share. As for "Obj-C didn't catch on", not true according to the TIOBE index.
- ralfd 15y agoCool link and a flashback to 12 years ago. Who would have known?
- Tichy 15y agoIs Objective-C really popular now? I mean would people volunteer to use it, if they weren't forced by Apple? One indicator would be that there would be ports of Objective-C to many platforms, is that the case?
- rbarooah 15y agoYou could make the same argument for other languages - I've never used Java out of preference, but have written 100,000s of lines of it because it was what was required to get the job done in the context. I still think it's popular.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mattmanser 15y agoCould you? Because there's the Mono project for .Net for example. Which seems pretty popular. Where's the ObjC equivalent?
- sambeau 15y agoA Mono-a-like is not required as Apple has fully open sourced it. Instead there's GCC, Clang and http://www.gnustep.org/ http://www.gnustep.org/
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- rbarooah 15y agoMy point is that the existence of ports is irrelevant. A language is popular if it is used by a lot of people. The choice to use it involves a lot more than language preference. To claim that objective-c doesn't count as popular because anyone who chooses to write for iOS must use it whether they like it or not, is like saying that java doesn't count as popular because anyone who chooses to develop on an emterprise stack that a corporation has built on java must use it.
- danielamitay 15y agoStats on popularity from TIOBE: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... (Obj-C now the 5th most popular and quickly rising)
- amir 15y agoNot an organic growth though.
- weekends 15y agodefine organic. In nature things grow quickly, sometimes exponentially all the time.
- reidrac 15y agoI always wondered if that popularity is tied to Apple devices. I mean... are there projects using Obj-C out of an Apple context? Other sources: http://lang-index.sourceforge.net/ http://lang-index.sourceforge.net/ https://github.com/languages https://github.com/languages
- davidw 15y agoOr, the best of them all: http://langpop.com http://langpop.com
- ShardPhoenix 15y agoUnfortunately this hasn't been updated in almost a year.
- davidw 15y agoI keep hoping someone will buy the thing from me. It's been fun to run it, and I think the metrics are a lot better than TIOBE's, but I just don't have the time any more.
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- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- zerostar07 15y agoThe (non)-success of GNUStep speaks volumes about how popular the ObjC library would be if it weren't for the monetary incentive provided by Apple.
- gaius 15y agoI don't think it's that. Rather a) on OSX, you might as well use real Cocoa and b) on Linux, if you want to integrate with anything else, then you might as well use GNOME/KDE.
- batista 15y agoExactly. C# is extremely popular, but Mono is a tiny niche in the Linux world.
- Argorak 15y agoI think the non-success of GNUStep is rooted in another problem: it is a beast to get running. I tried to get a GNUStep toolchain on my Mac when I started ObjC. No dice. Its really _hard_ to start. If GNUStep was as easy to start with like, say, QT, it would be much better.
- zerostar07 15y agoYou can look at that from another angle: Nobody cared enough to make decent tools for GNUStep, while many care about other languages (c, c++, java, python, ruby etc). Linux programmers are keen to copy UI effects from Apple, but so far they seem to keep away from its programming language
- Argorak 15y agoConsidering the work that ran into GNUStep, its window management, the libraries, etc., I think its the typical programmers oversight: it runs for me, why should I care to run it elsewhere?
- stcredzero 15y agoAnother datapoint for my theory for how Slashdot worked: the usual mob made enough actual experts mad enough to comment and other annoyed clueful people moderated those comments up. From what I have seen, Apple succeeds in part because they have a corporate culture that fosters good OO and good software architecture. Most companies through the early 2000's didn't have enough BS filtering capability to accomplish this. (Only the top 10% to 25% of shops had that, I would guess.) Add to that technical capability, the actual ability to market and an understanding of UX/design, and you start to understand how they can execute so well.
- canthonytucci 15y ago"Another datapoint for my theory for how Slashdot worked: the usual mob made enough actual experts mad enough to comment and other annoyed clueful people moderated those comments up." This made my day.
- zokier 15y agoDoes the story really have just 15 comments or is /. just bugged? Too bad that threading of legacy stories seems borked.
- crusso 15y agoBah, I've used Obj-C for a couple of multi-month stints just because I wanted to like it. I tried my hardest to get into the groove of it, but I just find it to be a really weak way to add objects on top of C.
- cicero 15y agoI heard about Objective-C before C++. The big complaint I remember about Objective-C was that it had a very different syntax for the O-O parts. When C++ came along, it was seen as having O-O more integrated into the C language. Also, I think Borland's Turbo C++ was a big boost for the language, which probably led to Microsoft adopting C++ rather than Objective-C. Also, I think the strong type checking and fast polymorphic dispatch were attractive features. Another thing to remember is that compilers were expensive back then. You couldn't just download a language from the web and try it out. Trying a new language mean an investment of several hundred dollars, and so you tended to just stick with your first choice. Turbo C++ was probably the first O-O language available for less than $100, so that became many people's introduction to O-O. I found C++ to be complex and difficult, but I thought that was just the price to pay for O-O. Later, when I learned Smalltalk, I realized that was not necessarily the case.