According to the Coding Standards Company TIOBE, their indexes showed that mobile programming language Objective-C has now become more popular than its mother language C++. This sudden movement in popularity is a confirmation that mobile development is moving ahead as we step in the post-personal computer generation. Objective-C is the high-level, general-purpose, object-oriented programming language used in Apple’s devices. It is mainly utilized by iOS developers and is also the main programming language used for OS X and their respective Application Programming Interfaces Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.
Objective-C was developed in the same year C++ was established, which was in 1983. After a few years, C++ became a more in-demand programming language between the two. By 1988, Apple’s founder Steve Jobs transformed the fate of Objective-C when he licensed it for his new computer company NeXT. It had very little progress in usage for the next twenty years with less than one percent in market share. In 2009 however, it had a complete turnabout when the development of iOS for Apple devices iPhone and iPad had become more widespread.
Nowadays, the two programming languages are no longer in competition with each other anymore, as according to the TIOBE index. The two languages are mainly used in separate fields with C++ being utilized heavily in massive high-performance systems while Objective-C is mainly employed in the mobile applications industry. Programming language Java on the other hand declined to the number two position. It exchanged spots with the programming language C, which advanced from Java’s 3.16% decline in comparison to their previous positions from last year.
TIOBE programming community index is a gauge being used to know the popularity of programming languages. It measures the popularity of a language by means of calculating the number of results from different search engines, which contains the name of the language. The results is provided monthly and it covers searches coming from Yahoo!, Google, MSN, Google Blogs, Bing, Amazon, Baidu, YouTube and Wikipedia. Current data can be access for free but long-term statistics are for sale.
iOS, also known as iPhone OS before, is the mobile operating system used by the computer company Apple Inc. It is developed, distributed and mainly utilized by the company for their different products and devices such as the iPad, iPod Touch, Apple TV and iPhone. It was first released in 2007 for the launch of their mobile devices iPhone and iPod Touch. Compared to Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows CE for Windows Phone, Apple’s iOS cannot be installed and utilized on non-Apple units and devices.
As of this year, Apple’s App Store already has more than six hundred fifty thousand iOS applications and counting; with downloads reaching more than thirty billion times. Its user interface is created on the idea of direct manipulation with the use of multi-touch gestures. Its interface control consists of buttons, switches and sliders with operating system interaction comprising of pinch, tap, swipe and reverse pinch gestures. It also has internal accelerometers that can be utilized on specific applications or commands such as undoing a certain command when the unit is shook.
