Gus Mueller:

To me, Objective-C has always felt expressive and capable, doubly so when I first started using it.

After Swift became popular, I felt kind of guilty still using Objective-C so heavily, but I’m over it. Micro.blog for Mac is all Objective-C. I did two new releases this week.

@manton Weird. I still love Objective-C. It’s one of the most fun languages to use.

@vincent Swift has long abandoned what made Obj-C nice and dynamic. I really wish Apple had actually done “Obj-C without the C” as they originally intended. Oh well, some people love it and that’s cool for them.

@manton Oh wow, interesting! I thought most ObjC diehards eventually gave in and switched to Swift over the years 😉

What is it that you like about it more than Swift (other than compile speed)?

@manton I still like to pretend Apple just kept making objective-c better and didn’t release swift.

@manton There are so many abandoned technologies by Apple that have simple fixes.

If you see how simple and modular my UIKit code is with a few helper methods: two lines to add and constrain a child VC….but the vanilla API forces you to write 10 lines of gibberdygook NSLayoutConstraint and didMoveToParent

@manton

There are so many abandoned technologies by Apple that have simple fixes.

If you see how simple and modular my UIKit code is with a few helper methods: two lines to add and constrain a child VC….but the vanilla API forces you to write 10 lines of gibberdygook NSLayoutConstraint and didMoveToParent

@manton They never should have released Swift with the generics they had back then. It’s horrible. Microsoft did the right thing with C# 2. Their generics have been fantastic after that.

@manton They never should have released Swift with the generics they had back then. It’s horrible. Microsoft did the right thing with C# 2. Their generics have been fantastic after that.

@manton ???

I’ve been writing Objective-C since before ARC was a thing. I’ve never had to use gibberdygook with NSLayoutContstraints. All you need to do is add all views to the view hierarchy and set the hidden property to true on the ones you need to hide for the current state.

@manton Yes, even compile times of pure Objective-C have gone down a lot.

@manton github.com/LucasVanDong…

This is what I mean.

The vanilla API’s for adding a. VC and layouts are super verbose for nothing. And don’t get me started on translatesAutoResizinMaskConstraints….

@manton If I was the CTO of Apple for 1 year all we would do is improve swift compile times, compiler error messages, and dev tools.

@manton That would be easy. You can cut 80% of compile times by just having SPM packages compile on the moment they’re added to the project.

We should team up for that job and bring Apple beyond the previous heights.

@manton Oh right. Yes, I solved that by putting most of these things in Xcode Code Snippets. Plus I use Storyboards and Nibs most of the time. Only if there’s a clear benefit to do it in code, then I will.

Amazing library by the way.

@manton Congratulations, you’re hired!