Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?

I had a weird relationship with ObjC getting into iOS in 2016, just on the cusp of the great renaming of Swift 2 to Swift 3, where my first employer was a little too cheap to get me an updated Big Nerd Ranch guidebook.

The common wisdom was; nobody will take you seriously as an engineer unless you learn Objective-C. I was also trying to understand the book "High Performance iOS Apps", all in ObjC, so had to take a lengthy segue through an ObjC tutorial book.

While this was useful for expanding my horizons somewhat, I have never in my career had to use ObjC in production.

I have, however, used it a little in the last 6 months, though ironically this was when writing a blog post about Apple's Animation APIs through history - to ensure I was authentic, I wrote the Quartz, OpenGL, and CoreAnimation sections in Objective-C. To this date, this is the only ObjC I have written which has done anything of value.

The blog post is here - https://jacobbartlett.substack.com/p/through-the-ages-apple-... The GitHub project is here (all open source!) - https://github.com/jacobsapps/animation-through-the-ages

Still have some in work projects, as they're old, but gradually moving on to Swift whatever we can.

Though in the FAANG world - Objective C reigns supreme

Still there for me. Kept meaning to spend the boot up time to migrate to Swift but have always been more keen to just get going. Now finally feeling a bit “forced” as I want to tap into Swift only things like widgets and live activities.

While all of our app are almost entirely Swift and Metal, I’d say it’s still invaluable to be proficient in Objective-C, given how relatively little investment it takes to understand.

Sometimes an old code sample is only available in ObjC. Sometimes you need to interop with a legacy API that wasn’t bridged cleanly. Sometimes it’s helpful to fiddle at runtime in debugging.

It’s kind of like how you probably shouldn’t write C nowadays, but C is still an important language every developer should be able to navigate.

Still using it when updating my apps written pre swift but 100% Swift now (not SwiftUI though) https://www.appblit.com/