Hi All,

I have a few questions about Objective C programming.

1. If Objective c language is good, how come no one else is using it?

2. Objective-C is one half of a complete solution, the complementary half being the Cocoa runtime. And that isn't something that Apple is going to share.In this open source world why no one else has managed to build a credible competitor?

Objective-C replaced Pascal(!) as the programming language used in Macintosh systems, and I don't think that it was a particularly successful one because, as you observe, no one else embraced it.

Since then, even Apple has turned-corner with its Swift language, which they did release to the world and which is now attracting strong interest as a potential "cross-platform" solution. (Along with "haXe," "OpenFL," and various PHP-successor tools produced by Facebook and others.)

In my opinion (and it is just my opinion), we fundamentally need:

1. Languages that give us a variety of options for deployment, strong typing and so forth without being bound to what some college-professor thought was a cool idea and foisted upon his graduate students.
2. Languages that are fundamentally cross-platform, so that if we are writing for iOS and Android and Tizen and whatever-happens-next™, we are not writing multiple source-code bases.

Objective-C, in addition to being "not particularly better than C++," was very specific to iOS and really could not be transported to anything else. So, cross-platform tools appeared that generate Objective-C as an intermediate source-code language to be fed into Apple's original compilers. Meanwhile, Swift appeared more-or-less as a new LLVM top-half for their existing code-generators, and it has been made open-source with cross-platform openly encouraged.

The jury is still out whether anyone else will "bite," though, because Swift is late coming to the table. Apple solutions are still "joined at the hip" to the underlying system libraries.

Today, I would not seriously pursue Objective-C, except to maintain existing applications that were developed in it. Today, I would develop in Swift or, more likely, a true cross-platform tool that considers multiple targets equally.

It's not good. It's actually a lot closer to "terrible". To me it works like a melding of the bad parts of LISP and the bad parts of C. However, it was the only (realistic) game in town for awhile in that arena, so it got widespread adoption.

Swift looks really good and hopefully we can now put Objective-C back in the 1970's where it belongs.