New to coding

[luke8733]

Hello, I have a Macbook Pro and would like to start programming in Xcode. What is the difference between Objective-C and Swift and which one should I learn? 

I also have a question on how to program and release websites with a language (maybe html??), what program should I use. 

 

Please have mercy, I have dipped into coding once and loved it. I am quite a noob.

[EpicAdom]

Hello, I have a Macbook Pro and would like to start programming in Xcode. What is the difference between Objective-C and Swift and which one should I learn? 

I also have a question on how to program and release websites with a language (maybe html??), what program should I use. 

 

Please have mercy, I have dipped into coding once and loved it. I am quite a noob.

Objective-C is older, while Swift is newer. Use Swift.

 

For websites, use HTML(5), CSS(3), and Javascript.

 

I'm not a mac guy so I don't know what to say for IDE's/text editors you should use for programming. My friend uses brackets and says that it's decent, but I would do more research.

[Isvan]

For mac, you'll be using the same editors that you would be on a Linus system. So Eclipse / Netbeans

One thing to remember is that all programming languages require that you know how to do the general programming logic, after that once you learn the syntax of a language you can program in it. Kinda like when you learn how to drive one car, you then drive other cars

[Nineshadow]

Objective C is not really beginner friendly , and it's kinda old.

Go with Swift if you really want to use a programming language from their ecosystem. I don't know what to say about it, but I'm a C++ guy so...

 

Also, programming is a lot more than just languages. There are lots of algorithms , programming techniques , data structures which you need to understand. They might even prove to be more important than the rules of the language itself , as they often carry over to other , if not all , programming languages.

 

And if you're looking into making web sites , well, that one is quite different compared to the usual programming. Really, they differ so much. You should learn html , which is pretty easy , then combine it with CSS, which is , again , really easy. Then comes javascript. Get a hold of some of its features. If you want to make interactive sites , you should probably use jQuery, which makes things a lot simpler for the interaction with the html file.

 

As far as IDEs goes , you have Xcode so I guess you could use it. I have no experience with it and can't say anything about it. Code::blocks is a really nice and simple C/C++ IDE.  There's also Visual Studio Code now , and you can use that as well. For Java, there's the "ubiquitous" Eclipse , but I really like IntelliJ more. For Python, PyCharm. And as far as HTML/CSS goes , any text editor should work. Still , I've heard of a piece of software called Coda which won an Apple Design Award, so there's that.

[LukeTim]

Out of Objective-C and Swift, go for Swift. It's much nicer, cleaner code with a lot of neat features and syntactic sugar (abbreviations that can make code shorter) that Objective-C doesn't. It'll be a lot easier for a beginner.

However, if I may offer an alternative, personally I find IDEs kind of daunting at first, particularly if you're a beginner, and OSX comes with Ruby and Python (links to tutorials) interpreters pre-installed. I would recommend learning with one of those two languages first, writing in a good text editor and executing through the command line. That's basically how I learned, at first typing up JS in a text editor and running in a browser, but I soon progressed to compiling C with GCC and running on the command line.

And, like @Isvan said, learning to program is more about learning the logic of it, the general structures and paradigms. Once you've done that you can pick up a new language in next to no time.

IDEs have all sorts of distracting features that a beginner simply does not need, what you want to do at that stage is focus on learning to program (of course!), and I feel like an IDE really makes it harder to understand what is going on. Once you have an appreciation for how it all works, then you can pick up an IDE to help make your work more efficient when you're really getting into real project work.

Of course, there's probably ways of writing Objective-C and Swift programs without the XCode IDE, but I have never done it myself.

[Tech N Gamer]

HTML is what websites use to show stuff, CSS is just the styling sheet, and JavaScript is what animates websites. Also, code to learn, don't learn to code.

[N0ps32]

HTML is what websites use to show stuff, CSS is just the styling sheet, and JavaScript is what animates websites. Also, code to learn, don't learn to code.

Actually it is much more efficient to use CSS for animations and not JS where possible.

Most CSS animations are GPU accelerated while JS runs on the CPU.

[Nineshadow]

Actually it is much more efficient to use CSS for animations and not JS where possible.

Most CSS animations are GPU accelerated while JS runs on the CPU.

The animations are probably made in CSS for sure , JS is just what triggers those animations most of the time.

[as96]

Before you read this post bare in mind that I've never use those two languages.

 

Swift should be simpler to use and reduce development time, Objective-C since it's based on C should provide the ability to handle memory manually but it's gonna be a bit more complex.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Crabtr]

OS X comes with Clang pre-installed. Install Sublime text or Vim and start learning C and/or C++ 

[flexluthor]

Swift, I tried Objective C and after a day of coding, I switched to Swift since it's way cleaner and appealing to code at. 

[UL_42L]

HTML is what websites use to show stuff, CSS is just the styling sheet, and JavaScript is what animates websites. Also, code to learn, don't learn to code.

Darn, I was gonna say that.

 

This might help you out, I learned a good bit from this guy: https://www.youtube.com/user/learncodeacademy/playlists

[joshmcd]

Html is not a programming language but it is a mark up language. I would consider Objective-c/swift and HTML as they are different in most ways.