[jimbokun]

"1. goofy/eyes-bleed syntax"

This is almost always an indication that a programming language critic has nothing really thoughtful to say. Same with Lisp and S-expressions.

If I may paraphrase: "It's slightly different than what I'm used to, therefor I despise it."

[thomasmallen]

I agree, the middle part is weak, but the bookends are compelling arguments.

[jimbokun]

You mean:

"impossible to find it being put to use outside of places apple forces it."

That's a huge caveat. iPhone development is extremely popular. Maybe the point is that people just put up with Objective C in order to do iPhone/Mac development. But I don't think that is true. NextStep had a small but rabidly devoted following, and part of that was because they really liked Objective C. Apple tried Java bindings to Cocoa at one point, but found everyone used Objective C anyways.

In general, I think it's true that most developers don't know much about ObjC until they want to develop for iPhone/Mac. But once they learn it, they tend to like it, from what I can tell.

[drwh0]

Apple tried Java bindings to Cocoa at one point

oh come on, it is well known that apple intentionally dragged their feet on their java support for years

probably because they realized that as gross as java was, very few people would bother with objective c if they could get first-class support for java on cocoa

[DLWormwood]

> oh come on, it is well known that apple intentionally dragged their feet on their java support for years

Apple (or more, exactly, the part from NeXT) did initially bet a lot on Java adoption. They ported the entire WebObjects stack from ObjC to Java, only to watch the technology get abandoned by those in the banking and eCommerce communities. The conversion was so total that when the Cocoa-To-Java bridge in OS X was deprecated, it was no longer possible to continue using the original WO tool chain. (What WO development outside of Apple exists made a new chain based on Eclipse, from what I read.)

[cpr]

No, if they "dragged their feet" it was simply because Java's static OO-ness doesn't map well to Objective-C's fully dynamic nature. Objective-C is basically just Smalltalk semantics (minus control structures) bolted on to C.

It works surprisingly well, but you can't and won't believe it until you try it yourself.

[thomasmallen]

That's inconsistent with how quickly Apple had Carbon ready using C. Just a matter of effort.

[boucher]

Carbon is a port of C APIs from the classic mac mostly. On top of that, Objective-C is ultimately C, and its easier to talk between the two than Java.

[drwh0]

This is almost always an indication that a programming language critic has nothing really thoughtful to say. Same with Lisp and S-expressions.

i didn't mention lisp or s-expressions. of course taste is subjective, but the "objective c is fugly" meme has lots of adherents