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Comment by themartorana | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to miss Objective C terribly. It is, hands down, still my favorite language (and ecosystem). It's interoperability with C got me into C. It was insanely powerful and fun.

I know not many people agree with me. I liked the square braces and crazy long function names. I know Swift is decent... It's not the same.

Oh well. Lamenting my path to software engineering doesn't mean much for anyone else. But I really am going to miss it.

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Is objective-C going away?

Also, are there any particular resources that you would recommend for beginners? I'm looking forward to reading this article since it might expose the low-level details of how, say, message passing works under the hood. Most of the guides are a bit too "beginner-oriented"; I'd love to find something that pulls up the carpets to reveal all the infrastructure underneath.

Swift is the future Apple is pushing to developers. There is an insane amount of Objective C in the world for sure, so it's not going away completely, but I expect more new work will choose Swift, and eventually Objective C will be relegated to Apple devs working on OS X itself, plus legacy apps.

But maybe I'm wrong, and I'd be happy if I were.

If you are already familiar with high-level Objective-C, I would recommend looking at the headers for the language runtime. All of the inner workings are exposed as C functions you can play with. Also take a look at Mike Ash's blog, which dives into a lot of details: https://mikeash.com/pyblog/?tag=objectivec

Also: http://www.sealiesoftware.com/blog/archive/index.html

I feel the exact same way about it but hopefully it isn't going to go anywhere any time soon.

WWDC 2016 will hopefully have some nice objective C announcements just like last years did.

Why miss it? Just go on using it! If important applications are written in Objective-C, that will motivate the spreading of Objective-C.

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