alt Hacker NewsThe underlying problem is the programming industry completely resisting learning the lessons of Objective-C because it doesn't like them. It didn't like them when NeXT tried selling it, and it doesn't like it now.
You can't have Cocoa without Obj-C, or at least a langauge and runtime with that philosophy.
Apple software has been on a clear decline for a seriously long time, and it's propped up almost entirely by them pulling off Apple Silicon combined with how Microsoft have somehow been even worse.
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This! I remember reading 'Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X' by Aaron Hillegass and being fascinated by it. Coming from Java, C, doing some DSP code, web work, Objective C and Cocoa at first seemed just utterly alien and a bit wrong.
Message passing, these loosely coupled 'delegates', a mixture of hardcore C, needing to do memory management but also just passing objects around in the runtime... messy, weird... but in the end the right solution to make flexible but performant software. I learned a lot from it. I should dive into the history of NeXT one day.
As someone who hasn’t used the language, I’m curious about what the valuable lessons of Objective-C are that the programming industry is resisting learning.