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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

Nobody loved objc. Apple forced people to do so. Sometimes people get Stockholm syndrome

They actually did.

When OS X was being developed, Apple was unsure about Objective-C potential adoption, so it made Java a tier 1 language, with an Objective-C bridge, just like Swift nowadays.

When it was clear that the Mac OS community, raised in Object Pascal and C++, had no issues with Objective-C, Java Bridge was dropped from OS X, and Apple contributed their JVM implementation to Sun.

Wow, never heard about this. Do you have more info?

Here,

"Steve Jobs reveals OS X Strategy WWDC 1998" => Java section

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ5BM9hNnwg

Java Bridge to Objective-C

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

Relevant part from the introduction

"The original OpenStep system developed by NeXT Software contained a number of object-oriented frameworks written in the Objective-C language. Most developers who used these frameworks wrote their code in Objective-C.

In recent years, the number of developers writing Java code has increased dramatically. For the benefit of these programmers, Apple Computer has provided Java APIs for these frameworks: Foundation Kit, AppKit, WebObjects, and Enterprise Objects. They were made possible by using techniques described later in this document. You can use these same techniques to expose your own Objective-C frameworks to Java code."

Cocoa Java integration

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

Java deprecation on OS X

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/releasenotes/Jav...

And after the deprecation/removal, contribution of their own changes back to OpenJDK

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2078216/apple-joins-oracle...

Sadly that video is no longer available to watch :(

It’s probably easier to use than COM on windows. The other interesting thing about it was that because of the message passing and easily inspectable objc_methname sections in the macho it was probably super easy for those early iPhone app coders to write some early apps before apple even shipped their first AppStore and iPhone OS 2.0 sdk.

COM is great as idea.

Unfortunately WinDev is so siloed into their way of thinking that never managed to create productive tooling.

The exceptions being VB 6, .NET Native and C++/CX.

It is somehow tragic that Delphi and C++ Builder are the most long lived toolchains that offer usable productivity with COM, and Microsoft itself is unable to keep productive tooling for COM going.

Probably nobody has ever gotten Stockholm Syndrome, including the hostages in Stockholm.

In a Babylon 5 episode (set a few centuries in the future) they call it the Helsinki Syndrome, which I thought was a clever little nod by the writer to remind us how a legend continues to mutate.

I'm not aware of a mention in B5 but they do call it Helsinki Syndrome in Die Hard.

NeXT loved it, and produced an amazingly ergonomic and productive application development experience on the back of it.

In the early days of NeXT (legend, and youtube videos have it) they wanted to address some of the shortcomings of Mac, and some of the most consistent feedback was that it was so "darned hard" to program the Mac, so Objc (along with IB, etc) was the answer.

I bought a NeXT because, among other reasons, it had Objective-C.

My graduation thesis was porting a particle engine from Objective-C/OpenGL into C++ on Windows, because NeXT's future was uncertain and my thesis supervisor wanted to get rid of his Cube.

What about those of us who liked it before Apple touched it?

It was a figure of speech. You were a tiny minority

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Popularity-Trend-of-the-...

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