There is an interesting article at
http://www.psynixis.com/blog/2008/04/25/did-apple-make-a-mistake-choosing-objective-c-for-iphone-sdk/ about Objective-C and iPhone application development. The best part of the article is the list of responses that follow. The author is not a fan of Objective-C, but the follow-up posts make some very good points about why Objective-C was chosen and give some interesting glimpses into the history of the platform and development environment.
JK
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I smell flamebate! As some of the comments on that blob indicate, putting Objective-C at the bottom of a list of 38 programming languages is deceptive. Of the languages on that list, I would consider only the following to be realistic for developing native apps on any platform: Java, C++, and Objective-C. (You could add C#, except of course Apple isn't about to adopt a language created by its chief competitor.) Including special-purpose languages like SAS, COBOL, Prolog, Matlab, PHP, et al., for example, is crazy; these are non-starters for a smartphone or other embedded environment, as are interpreted langauges like Python and Ruby. Pure C, without object-orientation, is too low-level to be useful for builing UIs and other crucial app components.
ReplyDeleteSo what this really comes down to is that Apple chose Objective-C over C++ and Java. As reported in the article, Apple had been using Objective-C successfully for years. So it's not all that surprising that Apple would choose Objective-C over the only two other contenders.