Gabriel Nicholas at Wired: The Subjective Charms of Objective-C

But the longer I spent writing Objective-C, the more I felt it hid rather than revealed. Long, sentence-like function names buried the most pertinent information under a fog of dependent clauses. Small features required long-winded pull requests, making it easy for engineers to get distracted during reviews and to miss bugs. Objective-C’s excess words, multiplied across thousands of files and millions of lines of code, made for an exhausting codebase.

My own experience with Objective-C has been very different. I wonder if that’s because I work as a solo developer, and the architecture of my apps has always been stable? I always found the early mantra “If it feels hard, you’re probably doing it wrong” when working with AppKit and Objective-C to be more true than not.

Anytime I hit a stumbling block something like “The Way of the Code Samurai” from Wil Shipley would play through my head. Were people who disliked Objective-C fighting it rather than flowing with it?

To me, Objective-C has always felt expressive and capable, doubly so when I first started using it. After coding in Java for years I felt like I could fly.

Swift is the thing now, and both Acorn and Retrobatch use it for parts. But Swift is a heavy and unsettled language, not to mention extremely slow to compile.

I hope someday we’ll get a version of Swift that isn’t chasing whatever the hot new coding paradigm currently is, and isn’t weighed down by ever expanding complexity. I think that could be pretty nice.

Chris Lattner, the creator of Swift, in an interview:

“Swift, the original idea was factor complexity (…) massively failed, in my opinion (…) Swift has turned into a gigantic, super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff”

I wonder, what comes after Swift?