When comparing Objective-C vs Elixir, the Slant community recommends Elixir for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Elixir is ranked 9th while Objective-C is ranked 74th. The most important reason people chose Elixir is:
Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM
Specs
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Pros
Pro Well Documented
Objective-C's documentation exists on Apple's website, and explains language features in detail.
Pro Develop Apple applications
Similar to C# and Java, but used to develop native applications for Apple hardware.
Pro Objective-C supports an open style of dynamic binding
A style that can accommodate a simple architecture for interactive user interfaces.
Pro Great for concurrency
Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM
Pro Great getting started tutorials
The tutorials are very clear and concise (even for a person not used to functional programming). Plus they are also very mobile friendly.
Pro Powerful metaprogramming
Write code that writes code with Elixir macros. Macros make metaprogramming possible and define the language itself.
Pro Full access to Erlang functions
You can call Erlang functions directly without any overhead: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/erlang-libraries.html
Pro Scalability
Elixir programming is ideal for applications that have many users or are actively growing their audience. Elixir can easily cope with much traffic without extra costs for additional servers.
More details can be found here.
Pro Great as a first functional programming language!
Pro Great documentation
Elixir's documentation is very good. It covers everything and always helps solving any problem you may have. It's also always available from the terminal.
Pro Syntax is similar to Ruby, making it familiar for people used to OOP
All of the benefits of Erlang; without as steep a learning curve of prolog based syntax. Elixir is heavily inspired by Ruby's syntax which many people love.
Pro Easy to download libraries
Comes with built in build tool called "mix". This will automatically download libraries and put them in the scope of the application when you add them to the "deps" function and run mix deps.get
Cons
Con Odd Syntax
Objective C's syntax is very alien to other languages. Learning Objective-C first will fail to expose you to a syntax style that would be relatively familiar in almost any other language.
Con Might as well learn Swift
Swift works almost anywhere Objective C does, and it was designed to replace Objective C.
Con One of the biggest mistakes ever.
It was meant to be one of the C-style languages, but has such bad syntax design it actually is the odd duck.
Con Apple-centric and obsolete
Con Tied into Apple's eco-system.
Con More Technical
To be able to do basic tasks in Objective-C requires a strong understanding of programming.
Con Requires Understanding of C-language.
Objective-C is built on top of C, and as such, requires at least a basic understanding of how to program in C.
Con Deployment is still not as easy as it should be
Con Some design choices may seem strange
Some design choices could have been a little more appealing, for example: using "do...end" comes natural in Ruby for blocks but Elixir uses them for everything and it looks pretty weird:
Enum.map [1, 2, 3], fn(x) -> x * 2 end
or
receive do
{:hello, msg} -> msg
{:world, msg} -> "won't match"
end