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Comment by toadi | Hacker News Reader

The hard part here is getting a curriculum to learn software engineering. Writing code is much much more then just a language. So much time spent on that. Just learn one freaking language and move on.

eg. I started with Basic -> QW Basic -> Pascal -> PHP -> Perl -> ruby -> golang and a lot of others languages too.

Writing code is not the hard part.

follow something like this: https://functionalcs.github.io/curriculum/

Or if you want to be something specifc follow this and find resources to learn about the topics: https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap

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> QW Basic

Did you mean GW-BASIC? Or maybe QBasic? Or perhaps QuickBasic? By the way, I have archived these obsolete pieces of software from MS-DOS era at https://github.com/susam/dosage (search for Basic in the README) if anyone wants to try their hands on them again.

And here's a compact list of the possible resources to use: https://teachyourselfcs.com

Also https://missing.csail.mit.edu.

To some extend the engineering part is emerging: when a code base grows it becomes necessary to learn technics to factor it. What I find really time consuming when using a new language is searching for its API.

You can also realistically learn Swift and then never have to write anything else again, until iOS stops being a career at least.

People used to think the same thing about Objective C

Yes, just as Flash/ActionScript. At a time, we almost believed Flash Player was everyone on the Internet.

Isn't ActionScript just a dialect of EcmaScript? I would guess transitioning from that to Javascript would be pretty easy.

Without the nice IDE experience though.

There was an IDE for ActionScript called FDT built on top of Eclipse.

I meant that JavaScript/HTML/CSS has yet to offer anything similar to the Flash development experience.

Well, the Flash IDE itself was a horrible compiler for those who write mostly ActionScript. We used to compile with few open source compilers. I have forgotten the names.

It still is, https://www.leaningtech.com/pages/cheerpxflash.html

Seems like it’s going to be many years before Objective-C is no longer viable, and there’s a lot of it to maintain (especially Apple’s). I think the only Swift-exclusive frameworks are SwiftUI, Combine, and WidgetKit.

It would be pretty crazy to learn only objective c today, unless you want to go after the legacy market specifically, like someone learning Cobol to get bank contracts.

Maybe it suits some people but for most people it’s sad and frustrating to work with old messy systems in obsolete languages when there’s a shiny new one that’s objectively much better in almost every way.

Here is a little secret, while Swift is the future of systems programming on Apple platforms, there is still plenty of stuff written in a mix of C++ and Objective-C.

In which languages do you think Core Audio and Metal are written on?

To the commenter's point though, Swift is the relatively easy part. UIKit throws you into the deep end right away, it descends from AppKit from native Mac app development and doesn't try to progressively disclose complexity like SwiftUI.

Why would you take a bet like that with Apple trying their best to destroy the iOS market for developers?

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