Much of the cutting edge today is based on Unix which has been continuously evolving since 1969... if you solve problems well from the outset, you often don't have to re-solve them over and over.
How many editors out there lack regex and multiple clipboards, both of which have been around forever in vi?
Know the past or you may accidentally reimplement a solution to a problem that has already solved in a better way.
ObjC is basically Smalltalk weakened by some dangerous efficiency hacks we haven't needed for a decade.
Similarly, virtual memory backed by paging to a swapfile is the beautiful, "right" solution to me intuitively for a memory architecture that is made of several storage classes of highly different access times; yet, I have to admit that hourglasses/beachballs aren't a part of most "mobile" systems but often are — frustratingly — part of the desktop OS experience.
In actual practice, there's very little unchecked pointer arithmetic in a Cocoa [Touch] app — you don't access the elements of an NSDictionary via direct (to you) pointer arithmetic but through well-tested methods that fail similarly to how to out-of-bounds collection access fails in managed systems.
Anyway, it's unfortunate that such things are essentially non-comparable in a scientific way to my knowledge; but my experience of ObjC apps is not that they tend to be more crashy or likely to corrupt my data than the Java/C# apps that I also use day-to-day.
we haven't needed for a decade.
IBM and others are actively working on bringing Smalltalk into the future.
You've hit the nail on the head with regard to my complaint.