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This is not really a good submission--it's got the rhetorical content of a tweet.
Most people who say they like Objective-C actually mean they like programming for Macs and iPhones.
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It's my favorite C variant (including C itself).
I agree. It is exactly what the name implies: a somewhat minimal object orientation layer on top of C. I wouldn't say the same thing about Cocoa though. Cocoa is good, but not great .
I've only coded a (really) simple app in Obj-c, but disliked the syntax.
But ramitos is right; it really is a Frankensteinian bolt-on addition of Smalltalk, syntax-wise. The message passing code simply does not look like C.
That said, I'd encourage everyone to give it a chance. I, too, had a negative reaction to it when I first encountered it ("It's so ugly!") but you get used to it, and then it's fine.
>Objective-C was Apple’s response to object-oriented programming Apple's response? At its inception it had nothing to do with Apple and for a long time was the language of NeXT. It's only since OSX that Apple has adopted Objective-C.
Since it's not mentioned anywhere, Obj-C was invented by Brad Cox and Tom Love and NeXT licenced it from them.
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I think it depends on what you want from the language. If you want to write C and gain some safety through the use of the message-passing abstraction, it's perfect. If you want a real high-level language, it's lousy.
With clang, ObjC is getting very interesting features that take it closer and closer to "real" high level languages, like GCD, ARC and blocks. I'd still like more type safety, but the evolution there is slower and would need more fundamental changes to the language and abandoning C compatibility.
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You can actually go one step further with your "Reason 2". Many may not realize this, but everything that you can do with the "bracket" part of Objective-C you can also do with straight-up C and the Objective-C Runtime methods. This is where I get to promote my favorite page of documentation ever: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/...
That's an excellent page, thanks! This actually makes me wonder... how much overhead is in each objective c object over a similar struct in c?
But, it's fast enough for 95% of things people do with it.
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With clang, ObjC is getting very interesting features that take it closer and closer to "real" high level languages, like GCD, ARC and blocks. I'd still like more type safety, but the evolution there is slower and would need more fundamental changes to the language and abandoning C compatibility.
I dunno--in an age where we have actual, halfway decent garbage collection, referring to ARC as something that might compete favorably with those "real" high level languages makes my eyes go a bit crossed.
People who like C should definitely take a look at Go. I think it can be a good alternative for higher-level projects.
I was personally a little off-put by Go. Some things just felt a little odd to me, after an admittedly small amount of time with the language (implemented a trivial app with it to play around). That said, I did quite like some aspects of it: goroutines, channels, functions can be added to structs. I am hoping that rust makes it out of the lab at some point.
Meh. I do not program in Objective-C but I think I can provide more reasons for liking the language than the linked article contains :) Reason 1: When you need what C provides, it is right there for you (being a superset of C) Reason 2: When you need what C does not provide (basic reflection, generics, polymorphism, whatever) it is in the "bracket" part of Objective-C. Reason 3: The two above do work quite well toget…
Or you could pick a well thought out OO language like Java or C#, maybe even Python. Unfortunately you're trapped using the abomination for iPhone development unless you pick Monotouch.