alt Hacker NewsOP 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.
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> Yet I'd say that it's relatively rare (while being completely absent in my experience) that anyone would choose ObjC today
There are a number of pragmatic reasons for this. Nobody is teaching ObjC anymore. Apple's documentation is now mostly Swift. Apple recommends Swift (and SwiftUI, despite the fact that many SwiftUI users have found it severely flawed). The job opportunities are mostly in Swift. I would say they're actually the same reasons people adopted ObjC back in the day. (Some other options were available, e.g., Carbon in pure C, Cocoa-Java.) Moreover, some newer Apple API are available only in Swift. Thus, Apple is pushing people into Swift whether they like it or not.
> There's nothing inherently wrong with either of us on those grounds.
Except that the thesis of your article depends on Swift being "more fun".
My belief is that Swift became popular among Apple developers for the same reason that Objective-C did before: Apple promoted the language. People jumped on Swift because they felt it was "the future". Some people were already claiming in 2014 that every line of code you write in Objective-C was "technical debt". Such claims turned out to be absurd, because old ObjC code still compiles and runs, while Swift 1.0 code does not.
ObjC "failed" because it was locked inside the Apple ecosystem, and Apple made no serious effort to change that. Ref counting aside, I thought it was a wonderful fun language. But it was always platform specific in a way that other languages aren't.
Compare with C++ which is widely hated, not because it's virtuosic - it really isn't - but because it's a bug-prone incoherent pile of archaeological standards and object bureaucracy, and most users only work with their own personally curated subset of it.
It's true some people like C++. It's widely used because it runs very, very fast, and trades that for slow compile times.
But some people also like jumping off mountains and trying not to hit the sides. I'm sure it's quite a rush on the way down. But not ideal as a daily commute.