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Comment by bunderbunder | Hacker News Reader

For what it’s worth, ObjC is not Apple’s brainchild. It just came along for the ride when they chose NEXTSTEP as the basis for Mac OS X.

I haven’t used it in a couple decades, but I do remember it fondly. I also suspect I’d hate it nowadays. Its roots are in a language that seemed revolutionary in the 80s and 90s - Smalltalk - and the melding of it with C also seemed revolutionary at the time. But the very same features that made it great then probably (just speculating - again I haven’t used it in a couple decades) aren’t so great now because a different evolutionary tree leapfrogged ahead of it. So most investment went into developing different solutions to the same problems, and ObjC, like Smalltalk, ends up being a weird anachronism that doesn’t play so nicely with modern tooling.

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I've never written whole applications in ObjC but have had to dabble with it as part of Ardour (ardour.org) implementation details for macOS.

I think it's a great language! As long as you can tolerate dynamic dispatch, you really do get the best of C/C++ combined with its run-time manipulable object type system. I have no reason to use it for more code than I have to, but I never grimace if I know I'm going to have to deal with it. Method swizzling is such a neat trick!

It is, and that’s part of what I loved about it. But it’s also the kind of trick that can quickly become a source of chaos on a project with many contributors and a lot of contributor churn, like we tend to get nowadays. Because - and this was the real point of Dijkstra’s famous paper; GOTO was just the most salient concrete example at the time - control flow mechanisms tend to be inscrutable in proportion to their power.

And, much like what happened to GOTO 40 years ago, language designers have invented less powerful language features that are perfectly acceptable 90% solutions. e.g. nowadays I’d generally pick higher order functions or the strategy pattern over method swizzling because they’re more amenable to static analysis and easier to trace with typical IDE tooling.

I don't really want to defend method swizzling (it's grotesque from some entirely reasonable perspectives). However, it does work on external/3rd party code (e.g. audio plugins) even when you don't have control over their source code. I'm not sure you can pull that off with "better" approaches ...

Problem come when a third-party code do that swizzling, looking at you every iOS analytics framework to this day.

That’s the main use case I can think of. It’s possible with other languages but may require more hacking.

I like monkey patching for testing legacy code. I like it less as a thing in production code because it can become a security and reliability problem.

Many of the built-in types in Objective C all have names beginning with “NS” like “NSString”. The NS stands for NeXTSTEP. I always found it insane that so many years later, every iPhone on Earth was running software written in a language released in the 80s. It’s definitely a weird language, but really quite pleasant once you get used to it, especially compared to other languages from the same time period. It’s truly remarkable they made something with such staying power.

Well, there are many more devices running on a language written in the 70s.

Assuming you mean C (C++ is an 80s child), that’s trivially true because devices with an ObjC SDK are a strict subset of devices that are running on C.

Yes, that is why I don't find it "insane" like the grandparent does, like yeah, devices run old languages because those languages work well for their intended purpose.

You should feel that C’s longevity is insane. How many languages have come and gone in the meantime? C is truly an impressive language that profoundly moved humanity forward. If that’s not insane (used colloquially) to you, then what is?

>It’s truly remarkable they made something with such staying power

What has had the staying power is the API because that API is for an operating system that has had that staying power. As you hint, the macOS of today is simply the evolution of NeXTSTEP (released in 1989). And iOS is just a light version of it.

But 1989 is not all that remarkable. The Linux API (POSIX) was introduced in 1988 but started in 1984 and based on an API that emerged in the 70s. And the Windows API goes back to 1985. Apple is the newest API of the three.

As far as languages go, the Ladybird team is abandoning Swift to stick with C++ which was released back in 1979. And of course C++ is just an evolution of C which goes back to 1972 and which almost all of Linux is still written in.

And what is Ladybird even? It is an HTML interpretter. HTML was introduced in 1993. Guess what operating system HTML and the first web browser was created on. That is right...NeXTSTEP.

In some ways ObjC’s and the NEXTSTEP API’s staying power is more impressive because they survived the failure of their relatively small patron organization. POSIX and C++ were developed at and supported by tech titans - the 1970s and 1980s equivalents of FAANG. Meanwhile back at the turn of the century we had all witnessed the demise of NeXT and many of us were anticipating the demise of Apple, and there was no particularly strong reason to believe that a union of the two would fare any better, let alone grow to become one of the A’s in FAANG.

I actually suspect that ObjC and the NeXT APIs played a big part in that success. I know they’ve fallen out of favor now, and for reasons I have to assume are good. But back in the early 2000s, the difference in how quickly I could develop a good GUI for OS X compared to what I was used to on Windows and GNOME was life changing. It attracted a bunch of developers to the platform, not just me, which spurred an accumulation of applications with noticeably better UX that, in turn, helped fuel Apple’s consumer sentiment revival.

Good take. Even back in the 1990s, OpenStep was thought to be the best way to develop a Windows app. But NeXT charged per-seat licenses, so it didn't get much use outside of Wall Street or other places where Jobs would personally show up. And of course something like iPhone is easier when they already had a UI framework and an IDE and etc.

> I always found it insane that so many years later, every iPhone on Earth was running software written in a language released in the 80s.

The constantly moving target fetish coming from the javascript camp may be misguided, you know...

Next was more or less an Apple spinoff, that was later acquired by Apple. Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture. And with Swift they are painting themselves into a corner.

> Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture.

What language would you have suggested for that mission and that era? Self or Smalltalk and give up on performance on 25-MHz-class processors? C or Pascal and give up an excellent object system with dynamic dispatch?

C's a great language in 1985, and a great starting point. But development of UI software is one of those areas where object oriented software really shines. What if we could get all the advantages of C as a procedural language, but graft on top an extremely lightweight object system with a spec of < 20 pages to take advantage of these new 1980s-era developments in software engineering, while keeping 100% of the maturity and performance of the C ecosystem? We could call it Objective-C.

And Objective-C is C. A strict superset, in fact.

   [aView display];

really, really, really isn't to your liking, you can write

   objc_msgSend( aView, @selector(display));

or even:

   objc_msgSend( aView, sel_registerName("display"));

That's pretty much all there is to it. But I have to admit I like the syntax better:

   [aView display];

(Hi mpw)

(Hi Adam, how's the flying?)

> Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture

Objective-C was actually created by a company called Stepstone that wanted what they saw as the productivity benefits of Smalltalk (OOP) with the performance and portability of C. Originally, Objective-C was seen as a C "pre-compiler".

One of the companies that licensed Objective-C was NeXT. They also saw pervasive OOP as a more productive way to build GUI applications. That was the core value proposition of NeXT.

NeXT ended up basically taking over Objective-C and then it became of a core part of Apple when Apple bought NeXT to create the next-generation of macOS (the one we have now).

So, Objective-C was actually born attempting to "use standards" (C instead of Smalltalk) and really has nothing to do with Apple culture. Of course, Apple and NeXT were brought into the world by Steve Jobs

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