A Personal Journey Through the Rise and Fall of Objective-C

This reflective piece explores the author’s personal and professional experience with Objective-C, a verbose but once-dominant programming language for Apple products. Tracing its roots to the 1980s, Objective-C was created by blending object-oriented programming concepts with the C language. Its survival into the modern era is attributed to its adoption by NeXT, the company Steve Jobs founded after leaving Apple, which later formed the foundation for macOS and iOS development. The author describes how Objective-C’s verbosity initially felt empowering, offering a sense of control and expressiveness during their early forays into app development. However, over time, that same verbosity became a burden, making large codebases difficult to maintain and debug. The article captures the broader evolution of programming languages and their philosophies, contrasting Objective-C’s maximalist approach with the minimalist ethos of Swift, the language that ultimately replaced it. The story ends with a poignant metaphor about programmers’ eternal search for the perfect language—echoing Leibniz’s dream of a universal scientific language—and the realization that such perfection may always be just out of reach.