[st3fan]

"and dropped it like a stone with little warning or ceremony"

What?! This is complete nonsense. Swift was introduced 11 (!) years ago and it was clear from day one that it was going to be the future. Every single year since the introduction there were clear messages and hints in documentation and WWDC that Swift is in and Objective-C will _eventually_ be out.

Little warning? Maybe if you kept your eyes closed the past 11 years.

And do not forget that today you can still write apps in Objective-C.

[kibwen]

Whether or not Apple still has legacy pieces in Objective-C or still allows you to write apps in it is not the issue. The point here is that Apple shadow-dropped Swift and shifted essentially all of its development priority away from Objective-C in a matter of months.

[st3fan]

I think that is a pretty inaccurate description of what happened the past 11 years.

[kibwen]

I'm old enough to remember when Objective-C was a real and thriving (if niche) language. I remember all the buzz when automatic reference counting was the next big thing, pushed heavily by Apple and taking center stage at WWDC. And since the year Swift came out, Objective-C has joined Cobol in the category of zombie languages: the living dead with plenty of entrenced codebases but with nothing to look forward to but a continued slide into technological irrelevance.