> Am 23.01.2021 um 21:38 schrieb Josh Freeman <[email protected]>: > > Dr. Brad Cox, who co-created the Objective-C language with business partner > Tom Love, has passed: > https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/scnow/name/brad-cox-obituary?pid=197454225
How sad. I still favour Objective-C (1.0) over all newer developments because Obj-C's design is straightforward and quite simple and I immediately recognised that it improves programmer's productivity significantly, when I first came into touch to Obj-C with Mac OS X 10.0 and switched from C++ immediately. I still admire that code is still readable after years. Even if someone else has written it. This is rarely the case with other languages if I scan through github projects. They seem to leave much more room to write unreadable code... > > If you'd like to read about Objective-C's early history, Dr. Cox co-wrote > an article last year, titled, "The origins of Objective-C at PPI/Stepstone > and its evolution at NeXT": > https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386332 (Free online eReader, PDF download) The key sentences for me in the article about the origins is: "When programmers saw brackets, they could instantly recognize that an object was being sent a message. Developers responsible for the larger design of an application would work mostly within the brackets". After reading this sentence I now really understand why I dislike Obj-C 2.0 which was so far only a gut feeling (I am not a programming language designer or software engineering researcher tinking about this all the day). It mixes C++/JAVA style messaging object.message(argument) with this simple "working inside brackets" principle and IMHO was a step backwards which makes code much less readable and reduces productivity. Thanks to Brad Cox for your clear and simple approach. And thanks, Josh for linking and letting us know.
