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You 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
by rbarooah 15y ago
You 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.
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- 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/
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- 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.
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- gauravk92 15y agoWell the entire stack is open source so no one needs to port it. I'm pretty sure that people like it because, it along with cocoa, makes iOS a great platform to develop apps for. But as for spreading objc, most of the features it has have been in dynamic languages like perl for many years longer. Perl even has objc lib bindings and much better integration in unix, albeit not necessarily for making apps. I think the popularity of objc is hindered more by the fact that people would be moving a step back, if they were using it for something besides what it's designed for (cocoa apps).
- Tichy 15y agoPerhaps for J2ME development, but apart from that I'd say thousands of companies have individually decided to use Java. Apple is just one company that has decided to use Objective-C. Edit: I forgot about Android, but Java was "popular" before that - in fact Android probably uses Java because Java was popular...
- davidw 15y ago> individually decided Languages aren't used in a vacuum, and the economics of them involve positive network externalities and switching costs, so 'individually' needs some qualification.
- Tichy 15y agoWhat kind of thing do you mean? I was (to my utter dismay) a Java developer for more than 10 years. Most of the time I worked on business internal projects or J2ME. Seems to me that for internal projects, the businesses could have chosen anything? Of course there was the hype, the hope to find more developers, the idea that there should be only one language in the company and so on. (All wrong, imo...) Maybe all those factors could be combined into a single one, "popularity" :-)
- davidw 15y agohttp://www.welton.it/articles/programming_language_economics http://www.welton.it/articles/programming_language_economics Is something I wrote about it several years ago.
- Tichy 15y agoI guess once Apple has created thousands of Objective-C developers (already done), it might become interesting for other things, too. It is a self-feeding loop.
- Daniel_Newby 15y agoHow can one have "utter dismay" for 10 years? Shouldn't it at least become "hopeless resignation" after the first few years?
- sek 15y agoThere is always the point where the ecosystem is the killer feature. Rails made Ruby very popular.