Objective-C, the language Apple wants developers to ditch for Swift, is attracting high hourly rates for programmers who work on freelance contracts.
In fact, according to freelance talent platform Upwork, freelancers who know Objective-C get the highest rates of any programming language, with contract work earning them an average rate of $66 per hour.
That’s despite Objective-C tumbling down Tiobe’s programming language popularity index this February. Objective-C is now the 19th most popular language on Tiobe’s August index, while Swift is in 12th place.
Apple introduced Swift in 2014 as a modern replacement to Objective-C, itself a superset of C, and has encouraged developers to use Swift to build iOS and macOS apps.
While Objective-C’s popularity has fallen in Tiobe’s rankings, there’s still a lot of legacy code written in Objective-C that needs to be maintained. This, and the supply of programmers who work with Objective-C, likely explain the higher hourly rate.
Issues around the supply and demand for ancient programming language skills came up during the US government’s attempt to roll out unemployment payments in unprecedented volumes this April because US state governments and the federal government couldn’t find enough COBOL developers to update the software underlying government systems.
By Liam Tung | September 3, 2020
