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Comment by mrpippy | Hacker News Reader

Related tweet from last week: https://twitter.com/krzyzanowskim/status/1062740353533513728

Observation: Before 2014, iOS conferences were iOS conferences and was mostly about how to use the frameworks. After 2014, iOS conferences renamed to Swift conferences and everyone tries to figure out how to use Swift - like this is the main pain point or what?

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In my experience, they're still about frameworks mostly, they just brand themselves as Swift conferences to indicate there isn't going to be any Objective-C oriented content presented, so people don't attend with the wrong expectation.

Swift-oriented content at a conference is also going to be popular, as unlike frameworks, it affects every developer, as compared to frameworks where only a percentage may use each one.

I wonder if there might still be new Objective-C content that could be presented for iOS development, or if everything is just Swift now.

A lot of major apps are still Objective-C codebases (Facebook, Spotify), though I would imagine everyone will migrate eventually, considering the momentum of open source libraries seems to be heading that way. As someone who works fulltime in Swift and previously in Objective-C, I'm slightly nostalgic for the days of long, descriptive method names, and faster compile times, but overall glad to have migrated.

Objective-C, as a language, is still improving slowly. But it’s pretty mature overall; the majority of Objective-C developers I know actually write Objective-C++ and hence tend to follow the development of new C++ features.

Swift is a complex language, and this allows for a lot more people to talk about how their programming paradigm is the best way to write Swift. It’s the same reason we often see articles like “extending Optionals” or “AutoLayout with a DSL” on Hacker News: Swift is so overwhelmingly used for iOS development that people seem to find it useful to specialize it in places where it designed to be general, and they love to tell other people about it.

Probably useful for justifying costs to managers if your company is currently migrating to Swift, which is pretty common in iOS shops at the time (and now?)

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