[mkremins]

I suspect they were referring more to the syntactic baggage in Objective-C – which is at least partially a result of the fact that ObjC was originally implemented as a simple C preprocessor. To avoid syntactic conflicts with C, ObjC uses lots of weird syntactic constructs that contribute to the language's characterization as ugly.

A good example is the liberal use of the @ character to denote ObjC literals – even in front of strings and numbers, because raw C strings/numbers have different semantics and won't play well with the standard ObjC APIs.

[clebio]

That's good context, thanks. When I dabbled in Objective-C, I found the excessive bracketing strange. Thanks for the background.