alt Hacker NewsThe fact that Swift is an Apple baby should indeed be considered a red flag. I know there are some Objective-C lovers out there but I think it is an abomination.
Apple is (was?) good at hardware design and UX, but they pretty bad at producing software.
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Years ago I wrote a toy Lisp implementation in Objective-C, ignoring Apple’s standard library and implementing my own class hierarchy. At that point it was basically standard C plus Smalltalk object dispatch, and it was a very cool language for that type of project.
I haven’t used it in Apple’s ecosystem, so maybe I am way off base here. But it seems to me that it was Apple’s effort to evolve the language away from its systems roots into a more suitable applications language that caused all the ugliness.
Some refer to the “Tim Cook doctrine” as a reason for Swift’s existence. It’s not meant to be good, just to fulfill the purpose of controlling that part of their products, so they don’t have to rely on someone else’s tooling.
For what it’s worth, ObjC is not Apple’s brainchild. It just came along for the ride when they chose NEXTSTEP as the basis for Mac OS X.
I haven’t used it in a couple decades, but I do remember it fondly. I also suspect I’d hate it nowadays. Its roots are in a language that seemed revolutionary in the 80s and 90s - Smalltalk - and the melding of it with C also seemed revolutionary at the time. But the very same features that made it great then probably (just speculating - again I haven’t used it in a couple decades) aren’t so great now because a different evolutionary tree leapfrogged ahead of it. So most investment went into developing different solutions to the same problems, and ObjC, like Smalltalk, ends up being a weird anachronism that doesn’t play so nicely with modern tooling.