[boucher]

I'd like to know what argument you would make to claim Objective-C isn't a "high level language". Despite the fuzziness of the term, I think Objective-C would meet most any bar that didn't specifically require the language to be interpreted. The only thing I can imagine being an issue is lack of support for closures, but a) it's coming to the language, and b) it's not radically more expressive than what objective-c already has to offer.

[timburks]

It's relative, and it's a distinction that changes as we make progress. Objective-C is a higher-level language than C, but as you noted, it's not interpreted, and I don't think it would be very pleasant to use as an interpreted language. It is verbose and repetitive (for example, to add a property to an Objective-C class requires you to add three lines of code in three separate places in your source code). And apart from the C preprocessor, it doesn't give us tools for building layers of abstractions that would hide these problems -- except for its handy ability to be used to write the implementation of something that future programmers might continue to see as "high level".

[boucher]

I don't think being interpreted matters. It may make your immediate development cycle faster, but that says nothing about long term development. I imagine the Scala guys would argue heavily that being compiled is a huge advantage to the power of that language, and would also strongly disagree that it isn't a high level language.

Objective-C properties are poorly done in my opinion, though you can add one in two lines with a given set of assumptions. But I don't think 1 vs. 3 lines is a meaningful indicator of very much either way; it's a small constant penalty, not some lack of expression at the core of the language.

Being verbose isn't a bad thing, and Objective-C isn't verbose in any meaningfully different way than most other languages. Header files may be a slight inconvenience, but they aren't even strictly necessary. Cocoa, the framework most commonly associated with Objective-C is verbose, and I think its a good thing. 90% of what you do as a programmer is read code, not write it. I gladly pay the penalty of 2x the keystrokes in return for half the mental overhead in reading the code. In reality, the penalty is less than 2, and the benefit may be more than 2, but its a matter of opinion.

You say you wouldn't like Obj-C as an interpreted language, I wonder if you're aware of Objective-J (http://cappuccino.org). It's essentially an interpreted version of Objective-C. It doesn't have header files, and it doesn't do properties the same way (it only does code generation for accessor methods, nothing else, but that generation is one extra keyword). It's interpreted, it has closures, and it generally has every feature JavaScript already has, plus dynamic message sending and classical inheritance courtesy of the Obj-J runtime (which is functionally equivalent to the Obj-C runtime). I'm biased, but I think its a great language.

[timburks]

Hi Ross, little things add up, and they are easy to fix in higher level languages (with macros). I consider programming to be a process of building abstractions, and I think the best high-level abstractions are concise.

I like to quote Peter Norvig on the subject of interpreted languages. But in his quote, he uses "interactive." Maybe that's a better word:

"Which way would you rather learn to play the piano: the normal, interactive way, in which you hear each note as soon as you hit a key, or "batch" mode, in which you only hear the notes after you finish a whole song? Clearly, interactive mode makes learning easier for the piano, and also for programming. Insist on a language with an interactive mode and use it." - Peter Norvig, Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.

I've seen Objective-J and generally have good feelings about Javascript. But it's not particularly strong on one other criteria that I like to apply, which is that it should be easy to mix code written at different language levels.

[boucher]

I see the value in being "interactive", but it isn't enough to rule out any other factor in choosing a language.

[tptacek]

That's easy. High level languages have data types other than "things that fit inside registers", structures, and objects. Objective C doesn't. High level languages do automatic memory management. Objective C didn't until 10.5.

Lots of high level languages don't have closures. Most of them have first-class string types. NSMutableString is a library.

[cosmo7]

So you're saying that C# is high level and Objective-C isn't?

[tptacek]

Absolutely, I am.