How your Objective-C skills can help you
Objective-C has been around since 1984 as an object orientated programming language used by Apple for the iOS and OS X operating systems. Times are changing fast however and Swift has significantly reduced Objective-C’s usage since its introduction in 2014.
Not everyone likes Swift though and if you prefer Objective-C there are still plenty of jobs out there for you and Objective-C is still the 12th most popular language with developers according to StackOverflow and the Tiobe Index has it as the 18th most popular language (down from 15th this year).
Many people give up learning and using Objective-C because of its unusual syntax but if you have already mastered that it is worth sticking with.
There are good arguments for learning both languages rather than favouring just one. If you’re new to Swift and Objective-C however there are many reasons to just learn Swift such as the richer coding environment, the modernity and the safety – but essentially because it’s easier to learn and write.
Objective-C has been around a long time and most third party libraries, frameworks and learning resources have been written in it. Swift is catching up fast however.
If you’re a MacOS developer you will certainly still need Objective-C and as everything in the iOS software Development Kit has been built in Objective-C you will be interacting with components still all written in it.
If you want to be a great iOS developer you will still need to write in Objective-C especially if you are working on an older project which hasn’t used Swift and also because not all of the iOS development tools have been optimised for Swift yet. This is why Objective-C is still the main development language for most companies but it is likely you will probably need to use more Swift shortly but still need your Objective-C skills once in a while.
Demand for Objective-C skills has dropped 30% this year in the UK for permanent and 16% for contract whilst Swift has risen 51% for Contract and 14% for Perm. The most important factor to note however is that there are still 4 x as many Objective-C jobs currently as Swift.