Will Apple continue to support it, or will we wake up one day to find that Swift is the only viable language?
It's a serious question. Careers depend on it. I don't accept the "No comment" approach that Apple usually takes. It's cruel.
I'm willing to put the time into learning Swift if I have to. I'm not going to do it if I don't. I want to know.
Frank
Swift sucks. I’m slowly abandoning Apple because of it and Mac OS is starting to look like iOS. Apple is punishing developers who don’t conform to their ****** swift language.
a good example of suckiness. https://github.com/Flying-Toast/swift-sucks
Long story short, Swift is mostly about politics.
I became a Software Developer basically because of MacOS-X and Objective-C. I just love the syntax, yes it can become a mess sometimes with all the nested brackets but it is pretty unique. Apple has been known for shaving layers of products and technologies (PowerPC WebObjects Carbon ...) so I wouldn't be surprised but I will be really disappointed. With Carbon Apple initially announced MacOS X and Cocoa and never mentioned anything about getting rid of it but they eventually did.
Regarding Swift it has nice things but the syntax is kind of boring tbh. I always wondered why Apple went with a new syntax instead of modernize Objective-C get rid of some redundancy and add new things like lambdas and so on. My hypothesis is that the original generation of Apple/Next developers were displaced by the new people coming from the Windows and GNU world that got in after the success of the iPhone.
Swift & Objective-C are going to be around for some time yet, sometimes one is required to add @objc in swift when they isn't not one single line of Objective-C code.
Swift is good for the right App, tho in some types of Apps Swift is totally the wrong language and Objective-C, C or C++ is best. Swift can work with Objective-C, C & C++ and the four when used appropriately is the best course of action, never design your App in one Language , keep your options open.
Work in a big tech company "MAMMA" as is called today, can't tell which one due to and NDA, a LOT of our codebase still Objc and there is no plans to move a single line, so rest assure Objc will be very alive at least in big tech projects, now for startups or some other projects Swift is ramping up quickly, but I worked in another company that had Objc code base and eventually we started moving to Swift, but it was always a combination of both worlds. Objc still as powerful as C/C++ today.