I read this blog post by Aaron Hillegass this morning and was immediately disappointed.

There are many things that I disagree with about this article, but there is one in particular that I took offence to.

Objective-C is easier to learn than Swift.

Really? Come on now. That’s just silly.

Objective-C is a really simple little extension to C.

I’m disappointed by this statement, because it is simply not true. Objective-C is a massive pain in the ass to learn. It’s a mix of language (with “weird” syntax), runtime (all that arcane knowledge), and frameworks (massive ones). Swift obviates the difficult with the first two, which is awesome.

Let’s consider a simple example.

NSLog(@"Hello, world!");

OK, so let’s take a look at this. Why is NS there? Why not just log? And why is there an @ sign in front of the string? That’s bizarre! Why doesn’t NSLog conform to standard Objective-C syntax?

Pedantic? Maybe. But I’m not the one claiming Objective-C is easier to learn than Swift. Let’s take a look at another example. I want an array, called array, of the numbers 1 to 5. Let’s contrast.

NSArray *array = @[@(1), @(2), @(3), @(4), @(5)];

Holy shit. Why is that asterisk there? (Yeah, explain pointers to a newcomer to programming. Have fun.) Again, what’s with all these @ signs?! It makes no sense! Why doesn’t this look more like the following?

var array = [1...5]

But then, that’s Swift.

I’ll tolerate people saying that “Swift is complex”, either because it’s unfamiliar or whatever reason you have. But come on. Objective-C being easier to learn? Give me a break.

As educators, it’s our job to put ourselves in the shoes of a beginner and see things through a newcomer’s eyes. I don’t see that happening in this article.

Aaron Hillegass is an amazing developer and business person. I have admired and looked up to him, and the Big nerd Ranch, for a long time now. However, this post feels like it was written out of fear. I think that it is a disservice to iOS newcomers.