[bediger4000]

I agree. I had a couple of NeXT slabs from 1991 to 2000 or so. Objective C had some benefits. The NeXT Obj-C libraries were very usable and well thought out. I will grant that it had problems, the biggest of which was that it wasn't Windows 3.11 and it wasn't backed by Microsoft. The amount of pro-Microsoft press and propaganda was astonishing during that period.

[pjmlp]

One single NeXT workstation could buy a bunch of Windows 3.11 PCs, I know, my gradution thesis was porting software from Objective-C to C++, originall written on a Cube.

[bediger4000]

Immaterial with respect to judgements of Objective-C as a programming language. The cost of one single NeXT workstation could have bought a bunch of eggs, flour, sugar and milk to make pies and cakes, too.

[pjmlp]

You joke, but the price of the whole package is what dictactes buying decisions, not the greatness of Objective-C as programming language.

StepStone failed in the market, the authors moved into NeXT, and it isn't as if NeXT was doing that great, when Apple decided to acquire it.

Also lets not forget, during the early OS X days, Apple was so unsure Objective-C would be uptaken by the Mac OS developer community that they decided to ride the Java wave with their own implementation and JavaBridge.

Only after they saw Objective-C was being fully embraced by the developer community, did they drop their efforts to make Java a first party language on OS X development.

Personally I never liked having to type @ [] all over the place, even though I am a big Smalltalk fan, starting with Smalltalk/V for Windows 3.x.

And all the macros for basic types (YES, NO, BOOL, ...) always seemed a bit dirty way to achieve them, instead of the C++ way of having proper keywords.

Well, without Objective-C there would be no Java, nor C#, so there is that, as positive influence.

https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere