
Ask HN: Would I be crazy to learn Objective C now? - ZoFreX
Until I heard about Swift, I was planning to learn ObjC in Q3 this year and get involved with a cool iOS project that uses it. Now that Swift has been announced, I&#x27;m wondering if this is still a solid career move, or if Objective C is now the latin of programming languages.<p>Will Swift completely supersede Objective C? To someone who knows neither but is interested in iOS and OS X development, would time spent learning ObjC be time wasted?
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dottrap
As a very long time Obj-C guy, Swift looks great and Swift looks like the
future. But if you need to learn Cocoa through existing resources (books,
tutorials, forums) or use/read existing code (3rd party libraries, code
snippets, header files), you will need to understand Obj-C too until enough
time such that everything has switched over.

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adam419
Curious about this myself. I recently begun learning Objective C past 2-3 week
and am curious whether to abandon ship and move over to swift.

However I think that most Objective C learning material is still a good
precursor for learning iOS in general and learning the structure of iOS apps.

Looking forward to hearing other answers.

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lyinsteve
Swift is built with Objective-C interoperability in mind. All of the
Objective-C Foundation classes are available in Swift, and they've done their
best to mitigate the differences in software design.

However, learning Swift without first learning how the underlying Objective-C
libraries work, the design patterns, the available functions, Swift-Objective-
C-Interop is going to be very difficult.

I'd recommend learning Swift and Objective-C at the same time. If you learn
how to do something in Swift, learn how to do it in Objective-C. Objective-C
isn't going anywhere, any time soon.

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jamesjguthrie
Due to the massive amounts of tutorials, Stack Overflow questions, libraries,
projects, etc. all written in/about Objective C for iOS and OS X, I personally
would not start anywhere else.

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RollAHardSix
So here's the deal. Obj C will be around for awhile. I think that's pretty
clear, but given that you know nothing, and Swift just came out and will more
then likely be the way of the future, why NOT take advantage and start with
Swift. That's just how I see it anyways.

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callmeed
If you have any plans to work on existing projects, especially in a freelance
capacity, I would say definitely yes.

In fact the only scenario I'd say no is if your only plan is to build your own
new apps from scratch.

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andymoe
I think it's still going to be valuable to know C, Objective-C as well as
Swift for iOS development work for a good while to come.

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allwein
Objective C is no more the Latin of programming languages than COBOL is. We'll
be dealing with ObjC for years to come.

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jagawhowho
Learn c and/or c++ deeply. You can target apple with these yet still have
freedom from apple. As well as some tricks that can't be done in the garbage
collected world. Cross platform native apps to boot.

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iends
How can you use C++ to write cocoa apps?

