According to a recent study, iPhone and iPad app development has a bigger learning than curve than any other mobile platform. It also costs developers more in terms of time and expenses to develop an iOS app than to create an Android, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone app.
Despite those challenges, iOS has boosted the popularity of Objective-C, the programming language used by Apple for both Mac and iOS development – making it the third most popular language with developers.
Given that the same study that listed iOS as the most costly platform for developers also noted that it offered the most financial reward, it’s easy to see why developers might opt for iOS development and Objective-C over some of the other platforms and programming languages out there.
According to the TIOBE Programming Community Index for July 2012, Objective-C beat out C++ for the number three spot. It comes in behind C and Java, which garnered the top two spots with 18.331% and 16.087% of developers using them respectively.
Both C and Java are much more commonly used across a range of platforms and developer environments that either Objective-C or C++, which have been neck and neck for the number three spot for quite some time. In July’s index, Objective-C garnered a respectable 9.335% to take the lead while C++ came in just slightly behind with 9.118% of developers actively using it.
The remaining programming languages making up the top ten list include a number of web-related languages.
- C 18.331%
- Java 16.087%
- Objective-C 9.335%
- C++ 9.118%
- C# 6.668%
- Visual Basic 5.695%
- PHP 5.012%
- Python 4.000%
- Perl 2.053%
- Ruby 1.768%
