Why Objective-C took three decades to reach its peak

Coders may not love talking about 30-year-old Objective-C as much as new programming languages. However, ask a professional developer about career paths, and you may hear about Objective-C a lot.

As of May 2013, Objective-C climbed to third place, behind Java and C, in the TIOBE Programming Community Index, which bases rankings on factors such as popularity in search results. While the economics of mobile app stores have made Objective-C one of the hot programming languages in the technology industry today, things weren't always that way.

Evolution of Objective-C

Developers have relied on the C programming language as a backbone of operating systems since the early 1970s. Former ITT technical manager Tom Love and fellow researcher Brad Cox spent the early 1980s exploring how to bring more object-oriented principles to C. After launching their own technology company, Love and Cox released the specification for Objective-C in 1983. History was made when Steve Jobs selected the language as the platform for systems at NeXT, the company he founded after leaving Apple.

Jobs brought Objective-C back to Apple when he returned, and it grew into the development language for both the Mac operating system and for iOS. According to Programming with Objective-C documentation in Apple's Developer Library, this language is suited for mobile devices. Dynamic typing and binding give applications extra flexibility while running, a key consideration for the way that end users start and stop interacting with apps on their devices.

Objective-C Gone Mobile

According to researchers at TIOBE Software, Objective-C remained a niche programming language for years after its release. The launch of the iPhone 3G in 2008 brought Objective-C to its largest audience ever. Apple's original iPhone relied on web applications running in its Safari browser to extend the device's capabilities. With the debut of the App Store in iOS 2.0, Objective-C developers could use Apple's infrastructure to sell software directly to end users.

By the end of 2012, Apple confirmed that over a million separate apps had been distributed via iTunes, with thousands of custom enterprise apps available through private networks. Objective-C earned Programming Language of the Year honors (for the highest yearly rise in ratings) from the TIOBE Programming Community Index in both 2011 and 2012, and it overtook C++ in 2013.

Future Programming Languages

What's in store for Objective-C and other established languages? Industry veterans like Dr. Dobb's Editor in Chief Andrew Binstock related that some tech observers expected a "renaissance" in C++ programming in 2012 tied to the release of Windows 8, but this Microsoft OS was overshadowed by a surge of Apple and Android mobile devices. The growth in Android's expansion could also affect Objective-C, according to Binstock. If Android continues to grab market share from Apple, then the growth of Objective-C could stabilize.

What about building new languages in the future? In a 2011 video, Tom Love suggests that Objective-C may have survived because it didn't try to change C but kept it intact. The language offered a clear transition for developers -- entering the square brackets meant you were entering the object world. Love notes that successful long-term development may not require building new programming languages from scratch, but instead extending existing options. In the meantime, long-lived Objective-C offers developers a potential pathway to careers in mobile apps and more.

Sources:

Apple Has Approved 1 Million Apps for the App Store, Seth Fiegerman, Nov. 19, 2012, http://mashable.com/2012/11/19/apple-app-store-1-million-submissions/
Company Bio of Dr. Tom Love, Co-Founder and CEO, ShouldersCorp, May 22, 2013, http://www.shoulderscorp.com/leadership_tom.html
Interview with Dr. Tom Love, Peter Erickson, April 20, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adI6-liGXqE
Programming with Objective-C, Apple Inc., 2013, https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ProgrammingWithObjectiveC/Introduction/Introduction.html
The Rise and Fall of Languages in 2012, Andrew Binstock, Dr. Dobb's, Jan. 8, 2013, http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-rise-and-fall-of-languages-in-2012/240145800
The Road to Code: An Interview with Brad Cox, Dave Dribin, MacTech, July 1, 2009, http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.25/25.07/2507RoadtoCode-BradCoxInterview/index.html
TIOBE Programming Community Index for May 2013, TIOBE Software, 2013, http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html