It looks as if Swift is the new go-to programming language for iPhone apps? (Maybe not that new…) I started by learning and using XCode about six years ago. I’m a former COBOL programmer so I understand the concepts. However, it did take me a good three years before I felt familiar enough with XCode to make it do what I wanted without too much trouble.
Is Xcode going to become obsolete? Is Swift a proprietary suite that’s likely to be deprecated in the future? Swift is so different I’d hate to have to take another couple years to learn it, when I’m comfortable with XCode.
I actually have a couple Swift tutorial books (including RW’s) but would rather spend my time creating apps than learning a new language. I’d even tried staring on objective-C a couple times but soon went back to XCode.
Xcode is Apple’s primary software development kit. Xcode 8 will be released in the autumn.
Swift and Objective C are programming languages. Swift has been public for about two years now and is still growing. Objective C, which has been around a good deal longer, is still supported.
All three have lots of users. It would be very surprising if any of them were deprecated any time soon.
As far as Xcode goes, I recommend doing some tutorials specific to Xcode. As someone who has to use Visual Studio and other editors in my day job, I have a real appreciation for how good Xcode actually is. Also, you can write C, C++, Objective-C and Swift in Xcode, all are supported.
As of the latest Xcode 8 beta, I still feel that Objective-C and C++ are supported better by the debugging tools. Swift is starting to get a lot better though.
Objective-C is still a very viable language for developing software on the platform. Many employers still want their developers to know Objective-C. When Swift is seen as stable I expect that to change. By stable I mean not going through as many changes to the language itself.
So why learn Swift? It is a good modern language that is improving all the time. It is a great first language for new developers and a good first language for people coming to the Apple platform. The caveat is that it will change some over your time using it if you are learning it now. Frankly, that is pretty normal in programming languages and APIs and not a reason to stay away.
Personally, as an amature dev, I highly suggest swift. Why? A few reasons:
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It is easy to learn but powerful. As my first real programming language that I actully used - I knew a bit of python beforehand - I can attest it is easy to pick up. That said, it is powerful. With Apple’s backing, it has continuously improved, and is quite fast.
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It is the future. Recall that the only real reason Apple used Objective-C was that they inherited it from NEXT… in other words, it was not the language of apps. Swift, created with today’s uses in mind and continuously improving with Apple’s backing, will only continue to displace Obj-C
At least… that is how I feel. There are absolutely many “correct” answers to this question.