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Is 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?
We've been using it for over a decade (small part of a major defense company). We do not (and have never) targeted any Apple operating systems.
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Also, can you assume that apps that even are in the Apple domain DO use Objective-C enough that it warrants calling the language "popular"? Or are we seeing apps written in another language with a bit of Objective-C to act as glue between the app and Cocoa/iOS?
I know that I strongly wish I could do iOS development that way, but I suspect it is not really practical yet :-(
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> 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.
What 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 thos…
Is something I wrote about it several years ago.
Is 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?
We've been using it for over a decade (small part of a major defense company). We do not (and have never) targeted any Apple operating systems.
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I 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/ https://github.com/languages
> are there projects using Obj-C out of an Apple context? It's the same as 12 years ago: just GNUStep and things in the GNUStep halo like Étoilé. Sony started a project to put GNUStep on mobile (SNAP) a few years ago and promptly dropped it. > I always wondered if that popularity is tied to Apple devices. There's no doubt about that.
http://blog.deliciousrobots.com/2010/11/27/sonys-changes-to-...
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Objective-C the language has always been extremely portable. Even pre-NeXT there were compilers/runtimes for Atari, Amiga, Mac, DOS/Windows, Unix, QNX, and probably a bunch of other systems I am not aware of. When NeXT shared their compiler patches and runtime (after some GPL-prodding), Objective-C became part of gcc and available on pretty much any supported platform, especially after the GNU-runtime delivered a por…
> Objective-C the language has always been extremely portable. Is there some inherent feature of the language that would make it more portable than others?
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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 required to get the job done in the context. I still think it's popular.
Perhaps 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...
But really, Java is a fine language, not much worse than C++, and, as far as static typing goes, fairly OK. What bothers me most is the insane proliferation of bloated frameworks and tools that Java seems to generate around itself. In order to use several popular tools, you need Eclipse. It's not a bad IDE, but needing an IDE for even basic stuff like building a web app clearly is a symptom of something that went very wrong. Some wrong decisions are really hard to undo.
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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 required to get the job done in the context. I still think it's popular.
Could you? Because there's the Mono project for .Net for example. Which seems pretty popular. Where's the ObjC equivalent?
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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> are there projects using Obj-C out of an Apple context? It's the same as 12 years ago: just GNUStep and things in the GNUStep halo like Étoilé. Sony started a project to put GNUStep on mobile (SNAP) a few years ago and promptly dropped it. > I always wondered if that popularity is tied to Apple devices. There's no doubt about that.
SNAP was a very strange story. I tried to google what happened and on 25 Nov 2010 all reported "big news: Sony is using Obj-C with GNUstep!" and two days later on the 27th "Sony killed SNAP!" http://blog.deliciousrobots.com/2010/11/27/sonys-changes-to-...
Is 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?
Also, can you assume that apps that even are in the Apple domain DO use Objective-C enough that it warrants calling the language "popular"? Or are we seeing apps written in another language with a bit of Objective-C to act as glue between the app and Cocoa/iOS?