Objective-C Comes of Age 437
New submitter IdleThoughts writes "Sometimes it takes a long time to spark a revolution. Long the ugly duckling of programming languages, iOS' Objective-C passed C# in the 'TIOBE Programming Community Index this month and seems on a trajectory to overtake C++ in the next few. It was invented in the early 1980s by Brad Cox and Tom Love, with the idea of creating 'Software Integrated Circuits' and heavily influenced by Smalltalk — yet another legacy from Xerox PARC, along with desktop GUIs, ethernet and laser printers. It was adopted early on by Steve Jobs' NeXTStep, the grand-daddy of all that is now OS X. It had to wait, however, for the mobile device revolution to have its day, being ideally suited to the limited resources on portable devices. It's still being actively developed by Apple and others, sporting the new automatic reference counting and static analysis in the Clang compiler. It turns out it has supported dynamic patching of code in applications all along. What more surprises does this venerable language have up its sleeve?"
Re:New features (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure someone just handed you a free PC when you decided to program for Windows or Linux.
My last Linux dev box was pulled from a dumpster by a friend, and was handed to me. I wiped the Windows XP installation off, installed Debian, and happily started coding, so, um... yes.
Re:Comes of age? (Score:5, Funny)
In software years, one does not come of age until his 30s, and only then because he finally accepts prostitution.
Re:New features (Score:1, Funny)
Yeah but it's not even original. It's a bad knock off of Java.
So it's like a Soviet Russian knock off of fisher price where instead of safe plastic, you get sharp rusty metal that give you AIDS and locks you into a lifetime treatment program to survive.
Surprise (Score:5, Funny)
What more surprises does this venerable language have up its sleeve?
Theres only one way to find out, and it involves wading through extraordinarily long, unintuitive, and overly verbose object, property, and method names until, Surprise!, you find yet another feature of limited utility.
Re:New features (Score:2, Funny)
You should see a doctor!
Re:Unobjective remarks on objective c (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like a hardware problem to me. I advise getting a professional neurologist on the job ASAP.
Re:New features (Score:5, Funny)
Let me guess, a Windows developer killed your dog, slept with your wife, read your Sports Illustrated and ruined your birthday party?
Worse.
A Windows developer developed Norton.
Another Windows developer got drunk one night and had all of his humanity removed and wrote Mcafee.
Then there was the infamous Windows developer that did Internet Explorer. I heard he started his career of terror by writing THIS [wikipedia.org] program.
Re:New features (Score:5, Funny)
That's nothing!
I built my last dev box from parts that I picked up off the side of the road as the electronic recycling trucks drove past.
The case comes from old cardboard boxes stolen from underneath the bridge where the homeless folks congregate.
It's powered by making extension cords unwound from burnt out vacuum cleaner motors and running them under high voltage power lines.
I got the software by painstakingly gluing a pile of old AOL CDs back together.
Re:New features (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds a lot like the Mono vs .NET debacle. There's absolutely nothing that says that Apple won't just come around and sue everybody elses buts off for unlicensed use of Objective-C and Apple's copyrighted APIs.
Oh, come on, Apple isn't going to sue you for using Objective-C. They send you a sympathy card and a case of aspirin.