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> So they had to make their own (again).

Objective-C wasn't created by Apple or NeXT.

Fair point but it doesn't change the argument.

Well then: Ruby integrates very nicely with Cocoa and UIKit via RubyMotion, so they didn't need to develop their own language.

MacRuby (which RubyMotion uses on OS X) is a custom version of Ruby with some significant changes under the hood and a lot of compatibility shims:

https://github.com/MacRuby/MacRuby/wiki/How-Does-MacRuby-Wor...

And MacRuby itself is written using Objective-C.

Objective-C (and now Swift) is OS X's system language and they are not applicable as a system language for any other platform.

You've moved the goalposts so far I'm not sure you're even in the same stadium anymore.

I'm not sure that's fair since you brought up MacRuby which is completely irrelevant to how well Swift would work for non-Apple platforms.

It completely undermines it. You have the direction of your dependency arrows mixed up.

Objective-C doesn't play nicely with other operating system APIs. Literally the only OS it plays nicely with is the one written for it specifically. It has found no success anywhere else. The direction doesn't even matter; both the language and the platform have evolved together.

Objective C plays nicely with any C and C++

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