alt Hacker NewsIt's ridiculous to call Objective-C "a false start".
1) Objective-C is 40 years old.
2) Objective-C was used to create NeXTSTEP and by extension Mac OS X and iOS.
3) Objective-C is no more "awkward" than any other programming language. I actually prefer its verbosity to Swift's terseness.
4) Although Swift did eventually become more popular, the claim about Objective-C that "the moment Swift existed, it evaporated" is not only false but a gross exaggeration.
OP here: Fair. Yet I'd say that it's relatively rare (while being completely absent in my experience) that anyone would choose ObjC today - and the article even mentions Pascal as a stronger example of the model you use with ObjC. ObjC survives today, as does Pascal, but its strongest impact is through influence, just as with Pascal.
And languages being awkward is entirely a personal opinion, agreed. You might think in ObjC. I do not. There's nothing inherently wrong with either of us on those grounds.