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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> ObjC is still around but feels like legacy to me

Yes, it feels like legacy because Apple is making it into legacy. Do you not admit that Apple's actions have a profound effect on the relative adoption of the two languages among Apple developers?

I would note that Swift is, like Objective-C, almost nonexistent outside of the Apple ecosystem, even though cross-platform use is possible. Developers who are deliberately outside the Apple ecosystem are generally not interested in a programming language controlled by Apple.

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And yes, you're absolutely right. Apple is making a choice here, and they absolutely have impact on what the developers "get to use" - much as .Net succeeds largely to vendor choices on Windows, too. And developers get to suck it up! That's the three axis thing again: vocation, art, job. Swift and .Net both got a huge kick from the "job" department. That's how it goes.

> That's the three axis thing again: vocation, art, job. Swift and .Net both got a huge kick from the "job" department.

Granted, Swift got a huge kick from the job department, but what you wrote said a lot more than that:

> A language that makes life hard will not survive past the moment it can be replaced.

> Objective-C was awkward as both art and job, and it thrived for fifteen years because it was the only door into the most lucrative developer ecosystem ever built; the moment Swift existed, it evaporated and now survives as a shadow, preserved in its descendant.

Apparently you're admitting now that "the moment" is a gross exaggeration. You're also admitting that the "art" aspect is controversial, a matter of personal opinions that vary. I'm not sure why you claimed that Objective-C was "awkward as... job" even before Swift existed?

I wrote that it was awkward because IMO it was. That is indeed "my opinion" - I found the language it used to express concepts far more useful than the language itself, and found myself writing C++ far more often than ever wanting to write ObjC.

It's unclear whether your last comment is talking about the art or the job axis, the latter of which I just asked about.

I certainly don't see how using C++ would be less awkward on the job for developers than ObjC when the job was primarily calling ObjC system API.

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