TIOBE released the programming index for September 2012. There is no big change for this month compared to last month, the top 3 are still C, Java and Objective-C. In top 20, only Transact-SQL exchanged the position with VB.NET. Java shows trend of drop, will it be worse because of the ignorance of Java's vulnerabilities by Oracle.This index shows that the programing lnaguage market is quite normal, no big events. Except Objective-C, in recent years there are no other new languages which have big rank leap. If we expect that Scala, Dart or Clojure have big breakthrough, then how long should we...

TIOBE recently released the programming community index for July. From the index,we can find that the biggest change is that Objective-C overtakes C++ as the 3rd most popular language among programmers. Because of the popularity of iPhone and iPad, Objective-C is used by more and more mobile developers who want to develop apps for Apple products. Also, many developers are willing to develop apps for Apple since they can gain more profit on Apple platform than on Android platform.C++ is mainly used for developing high performance large systems, this is different from Objective-C which is mainly...

As an active member of "The Internet" and vocal Objective-C coder, I get a lot of questions surrounding the language. They're often framed around thinking about learning the language or trying to write an app, but they also usually involve a phrase like "Objective-C looks really hard" or "what are all those minus signs about?" Both of these are pretty good questions, and I'd like to address why someone might be more hesitant to jump into iOS or OS X development compared to, say, Ruby or Java.SyntaxLet's talk about what a programming language is. A programming language is the human-readable cod...

Javascript, PHP, Ruby functionsI assume you are very familiar with declaring functions in any of the languages above, if not, you should not be reading this. Let’s begin with a simple function to send email in these languages:// PHP or Javascriptdo_send_email (recipient, cc, subject, body);// Rubydo_send_email (recipient, cc, subject, body)So it’s clear by looking at the function’s signature that it takes 4 parameters and they could be optional, depends on your implementation. Even if you missed one parameter, in most cases it is fine, no complain, no fatal error.First enc...

What will programming in Objective-C mean to the C++ programmerDifferent Object Oriented LanguagesAlmost all of us have heard the term object oriented programming, and most of us have used C++. How will Apple's purchase of NeXT, and NeXT's framework using Objective-C affect us as we develop software? If we know C++ already, how hard will it be to get up to speed on Objective-C? Many people will agree that once they understand the concepts of object oriented programming it doesn't matter which language they use. To a degree this is true, but development is easier if the programmer adopts a prog...

My good friend Brent Simmons invokes a historical email from Linus Torvalds, about his disdain for C++C++ is a horrible language. It’s made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it’s much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.Brent affirms his support while paying homage to plain-old C:But I will admit to an enduring love of C. I still think of C not as C but as the language.I loved C. Emphasis on the past-tense. As object-oriented programming concepts became popular, those of us who were programming in C or simi...

An unashamed apologist’s perspective on the loveliest language i’ve worked with.I’ve worked with a lot of programming languages in my time. Not a huge number, mind you, but enough that i can say that i’m open minded and seasoned about it. And, as they say: ‘Don’t feed the trolls’ – well, i’m about to do exactly that: feed the trolls at work who love to rag on about how awful obj-c is! So here i go, foolishly treading where no sensible man dares go: justifying why i love obj-c.Ugly?But it’s so ugly! Brackets!This one is a fair...