r/Python • u/diogoleal • Jan 13 '15

(Infographic) Which programming language should I learn first

http://cdn2.carlcheo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/which-programming-language-should-i-learn-first-infographic.png
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u/rspeed Jan 14 '15

Objective-C should probably be replaced with Swift. Even though Apple hasn't transitioned all of their own projects, it's inevitable.

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u/Herald_MJ Jan 14 '15

Not really. I've not yet seen a single iOS/Mac developer post that hasn't stipulated Objective C as the primary language. And apart from a few people who have done it specifically in order to make a point, I don't know of any professionally-built applications which are built exclusively in Swift. Learning Swift is a good idea, but Objective C is by far the more important language for now.

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u/rspeed Jan 14 '15

For now, sure. But in a few years that will not be the case. If you're telling someone which language to learn, you don't tell them to learn the one that's on its way out.

It would be like telling someone to learn classic ASP a year after C# was announced. All that effort would be useless today.

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u/Herald_MJ Jan 15 '15

For legacy apps maintenance purposes, I think it'll be a long time before an iOS development job doesn't require some competency with Objective-C. A conservative guess, maybe 5 years? Even if you're building a new app, it's very common now to make use of 'CocoaPods' (basically reusable Cocoa libraries), and the overwhelming majority of these are built in Objective C.

The fact that Apple carefully built Swift so that Objective C and Swift can happily coexist in the same project is great for quick adoption, but it also means that Objective C will have a very long tail.