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Objective-C overtakes C++ to become 3rd most popular language
- petercooper 14y agoThough on the same chart Ruby is climbing while JavaScript falls. Being involved with both, that's certainly not how it's playing out on the ground.. (Yes, yes, the old story about TIOBE being useful for trends and not absolutes.. :-))
- damian2000 14y agoYeah ... agreed. I can't understand how Perl could be above JS either.
- charliesome 14y agoYou underestimate just how much Perl there is out there (hint: a lot)
- se85 14y agoI'm sorry but there is no way there could be more perl out there than javascript. Although I agree that a lot of people underestimate perl generally speaking.
- tjogin 14y agoHow about the fact that Visual Basic tops both?
- minikomi 14y agoAnd Logo is above bash..
- Skywing 14y agoCrap. Time to switch to C.
- craigvn 14y agoShows how pointless TIOBE is. C++ is still light years ahead of Objective-C use in the field.
- wsc981 14y agoIn which field? Surely Objective-C & Apple's frameworks are much more suited towards general purpose mobile apps? And surely C++ is much more suited towards e.g. games?
- jlarocco 14y agoHow about anything that isn't developed solely for iPhone/iPad? Objective-C is high on the list because it's trendy to write iPhone apps, so people blog about it and write a million "How to get started with objective-C" tutorials for it. Outside of that niche, and a really small group of OSX developers, there's zero Objective-C development. It's barely even possible to write Objective-C on Windows or Linux.
- terhechte 14y agoOn Linux, Gnustep offers a really good Objective-C stack.
- nevster 14y agoUsual caveats about taking TIOBE with a grain of salt...
- robert_nsu 14y agoI glance at TIOBE from time to time. My biggest gripe is just because a language is searched does not mean it's being used.
- mhd 14y agoGiven the peculiarities of Tiobe, I'm more surprised about Ada being on the list at all.
- yen223 14y agoOut of curiosity, who uses Ada? The DoD?
- ricardobeat 14y agoThe aerospace industry, traffic control, railways, industrial automation, banks and the military. http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada-project-summary.html http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada-project-summary.html
- mhd 14y agoIt actually was mandatory in the past for some DoD projects. Not anymore, for quite a while, which is why I'm surprised. It's never been a hip language, and so I would expect Ada engineering positions to be somewhat like Cobol jobs, i.e. maintenance and legacy. And thus not as likely to appear on things like Tiobe. It's an interesting language, worth a look.
- thetabyte 14y agoDo that many people still use Visual Basic? Honestly, I'd like to know. I'd think surely that group of people would be on C#/.NET?
- yen223 14y agoThere's still a lot of legacy software running VB, e.g. the camera software that I'm currently working with now. Software written in VB.net for the most part plays nicely with C#.net, so there's no hurry to upgrade. I find it hard to believe that it actually _increased_ in ranking though.
- aeurielesn 14y agoYou will be surprised how used/popular VB6 is. Some results from a Microsoft's VB6 survey on [1]. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/637671/417685 http://stackoverflow.com/a/637671/417685
- chmike 14y agoMost used is not the same as most popular ! People use objective-C when programming for iOS or iPhone. These are popular, not the programming language.
- veyron 14y agoNot really surprising: Except for some very limited cases, I found that python performance is comparable to C++ performance for solving problems (obviously using python/C++ idioms where relevant). I rarely use C++, opting for C for performance reasons.
- charliesome 14y ago> Except for some very limited cases, I found that python performance is comparable to C++ performance for solving problems I have a hard time buying this. What cases have you found where Python is comparable to C++?
- cageface 14y agoPython is comparable to C/C++ when the code you write spends most of its time in the many Python libraries which are written in C. If your program spends most of its time actually executing code in Python then a comparable C++ implementation will probably be two or more orders of magnitude faster.
- mseepgood 14y agoWhen he uses NumPy that is implemented in C.
- eswangren 14y agoAnd by "limited cases" I assume you mean "performance critical code"?
- veyron 14y agoeven in performance critical code, unless you are doing some very aggressive bit twiddling or assembly-level optimizations, python can hold its own. Although at that point, C is easier to work with ...
- cageface 14y agoEven taken with a large grain of salt as the TIOBE rankings must be, this is unfortunate since Obj-C is a pretty poor language, IMO. After a year of working almost exclusively in Obj-C I still haven't come to enjoy its verbosity and awkward and incomplete collection classes. The lack of namespaces and inadvertent selector overloading are a regular nuisance. And the Cocoa frameworks are more dynamic than they need to be and heavy use of notifications and KVO make code a rat's nest of indirect jumps that are very hard to follow. It's ok as a widget glue language, I suppose, but really a lot of other languages could serve that purpose just as well without standing over the flaming pit of C all the time. The new collection literals and operator overloads for the collection classes will help, of course. And you have to give Cox some credit for a design that was, in its time, quite visionary. But language design has caught up to and passed Obj-C by in the meantime. If it weren't for my reservations about having one more software layer between me and the machine I would have moved to MonoTouch/C# a long time ago.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- zoul 14y agoI think that Objective-C is pretty sweet. The problem is that you can’t cherry-pick language features. Each of them has implications for the rest of the language, forcing you into some compromise. As an example, when Objective-C picked great compatibility with C, it picked some great strengths (using existing C libraries, language familiarity, being close to the metal) along with some downsides. For me, the Objective-C strengths are worth the downsides. Some of your points are purely subjective. I would pick Objective-C verbosity again, because it makes me think less. I can generally parse long words at a glance and code completion saves me typing. Some identifiers are too long indeed, but the consistency is a win. For me. I don’t see what’s so awkward about collection classes and you don’t say what is that you miss. Granted, the collection literals are too verbose, but that will get much better with the upcoming Xcode release, just as you said. And even the older, verbose syntax is not a language deal-breaker for me. KVO and notifications are not always roses, but can you give an example of what bugs you along with a solution in a different language that you consider superior? Again, my main point is that each language design is a compromise and I quite like the compromise represented by Objective-C. Namely, the simplicity of the language, the balance between the metal and a higher-level language, the readable syntax and the standard libraries.
- stewie2 14y agoI really like objective-c. I think my perfect language should be something between C++ and objective-c.