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Comment by fishnchips | Hacker News Reader

Am I reading this incorrectly, or there is more movement from Swift to Objective-C than the other way around? Do I sense a methodological error?

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Absolutely an error there. If you try to search the literal string "move from swift to Objective-c", Google rejects the precision given there are so few results, and searches only for the words independently. The bulk of results in that case are actually about moving from Objective-C to Swift.

If you search "move from Objective-c to Swift", there are actually enough results that it honors the literal string, yielding far fewer results.

Definitely a major methodology error for pairs with a large asymmetry.

Nonetheless I found the post humorous, and I don't think it was held with the conviction some of the top posts seem to think.

I'm guessing that there are a lot of articles saying "We tried to embrace Swift, but found that it's not ready for prime time, so we're going back to Objective-C for now." Meanwhile, no one's going to bother to write an article justifying their decision to switch from Objective-C to Swift, because it's an expected migration.

So maybe that's a flaw in the whole exercise: it's only taking into account remarkable/unusual language switches, the ones people think are worth writing articles about.

I had this exact reaction to the graphs that also showed:

1. Movement from Postgres to MySQL

2. Movement from Mariadb to MySQL (and NOT the other way around?!?)

3. Movement from PHP to Java (I remember the sort of people leaving Java for PHP 10 years ago, and I don't think they'd go back, or that PHP people would pick Java as their choice to move to)

I think maybe he has the axes labeled wrong?

MySQL is actually seeing a resurgence as people realize that ACID is valuable and performance is just fine for 99.9% of use-cases.

And Java is seeing a bit of a resurgence as well as people get fed up with shitty PHP and other dynamically typed languages. Java has some frameworks like Dropwizard and Spring Boot that make it not as terrible anymore.

> MySQL is actually seeing a resurgence as people realize that ACID is valuable and performance is just fine for 99.9% of use-cases.

That wouldn't explain why people jump from the database with better ACID (Postgres) to the one with generally worse ACID (MySQL). Or why people would move from the open source non-Oracle fork (MariaDB) to the Oracle-acquired original project that everyone forked away from (MySQL).

> And Java...

Oh, I agree. Java is awesome these days. I'm just making a disparaging blanket generalization about the people who jumped to shitty PHP to begin with.

Author here. Yes you are reading this incorrectly. Look at the contingency table.

objective c to swift: 5216 swift to objective c: 1639

(sorry about the small font size though. had to squint really hard)

The contingency table shows these very clearly, but I believe the question is about the future popularity table.

The future probability table shows that Swift is to the left of (smaller future probability) of Objective C. The coloring of the chart shows a much darker square for Swift -> Objective C than for Objective C -> Swift.

It seems surprising given your contingency table that your analysis would show that Objective C is going to be the more popular of the two.

if I understand it correctly that means that most people who move away from swift move to Objective C, but people moving away from Objective C also move to C# and Java.

Yes, this is correct. The second table shows conditional probabilities. Almost everyone moving from ObjC goes to Swift, but conversely out of the people moving from Swift it's more spread out

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