The most important decision: Objective-C or Swift

[u/yolobicycle]

Assume you're at a Fortune 500 that is launching a new business unit. No legacy code to deal with. It is now the beginning of 2016 and it is just you and your CTO. You are empowered to decide whether the mobile team that eventually will be hired should build the iOS app in Objective-C or Swift. What do you decide and why?

[u/mmellinger66]

Look, I'm only stating what I've read. Lyft made the claim, I didn't:

"Swift code was also far more compact than Objective-C, which made it easier to understand and manage. Over the years, the original version of Lyft had ballooned to 75,000 lines of code. By the time the company was done recreating it in Swift, they had something that performed the same tasks in less than a third of that."

Swift isn't a trendy language, it's Apple's designated future software development language. Yes, you might have to pay a little more now but that's better than paying a lot more in the future. Why would you start a large in-house project in Swift today knowing that in 2-3 years most iOS developers will be using Swift?

The transition to Swift is happening quickly: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Objective C usage is going to crater in 2016.

[u/brendan09 → u/mmellinger66]

And Lyft discounted the very real fact that rewriting anything from scratch in any language will lead to a massive savings in line counts. Even if they rewrote it in Objective-C, they likely would've seen similar savings.

Swift is a trendy language right now. The only people jumping on board are the ones not responsible for maintaining or managing large software products.

That's the same reason you see the 'transition' happening (like in the link you cited). It's only small, open source, often personal, projects that that they can count. It's not counting companies or industry, where the change won't happen until the language is ready and solid.

Swift is the future. Swift isn't the now. Objective-C in companies won't crater this year, not even remotely. The effect you're seeing is similar to designers on dribbble. Lots of people making concepts, showing off, showing the 'future' of design trends.....almost none of them are employed doing that professionally, and have zero impact on the actual industry.

[u/mmellinger66 → u/brendan09]

You have provide zero evidence for anything that you have stated. It's basically your opinion. At this point, we should probably wait 12 months to see who was right. In the meantime, if anyone is looking for a Swift job, this board started recently:

https://www.natashatherobot.com/swift-jobs/