Back in 2015 I gave a talk titled “Cocoa is the new Carbon: the Future of Apple’s Beloved Framework”, whose presentation has a slide that said “Cocoa should remain for backwards compatibility during 10 years at least, until 2025”.
(Ah, I loved creating presentation slides with Deckset. Le sigh.)
As I write these lines, we literally are in 2025, the age of the AI LLM chatbot. So if I ask any of those guys, like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Cursor, or Lumo (one of the the newest kid on the block, made by Proton), whether one can write iOS apps with Objective-C and Cocoa, they confirm that yes, you can, as neither of them has been officially deprecated by Apple. But apparently quite a few APIs are Swift-only these days, and of course the whole community has moved on, so good luck finding documentation, support, or even new open-source libraries written in good old Objective-C.
So, yeah, my prediction held, even if predicting the future in the IT industry is risky business anyway. Yay for me.
When Swift came out in 2014, I just didn’t find it interesting, exciting, or useful (actually, I was shocked by the bad quality of the first three releases of the language). I never quite liked it. I tried as hard as I could, I used it for work, I used in personal projects, I released some library in it (remember SwiftMoment?), but it never quite clicked. That’s one of the reasons why I jumped to other galaxies (namely, the “Cloud Native” one) in 2019.
Here’s the thing: the reason I jumped so gladly into iPhone apps back in 2008 was because I loved Objective-C. It still is one of my preferred programming languages ever. I play with ObjFW as much as I can.
Call me boomer (I’m Gen X actually, but who’s counting) but I like calling methods sending messages with square brackets.
[self beHappy];