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◈ALB Atlas

Objective-C Maintenance

Objective-C
KindProgramming language
Appeared1984
StatusMaintenance
CreatorBrad Cox & Tom Love / Stepstone
FamilyC
Sourcedeveloper.apple.com ↗

Smalltalk bolted onto C — NeXT bet the company on it, Apple inherited the bet, and three decades of OS X and iOS shipped in it.

Descended from C
Influenced by Smalltalk
Created by Brad Cox
Influenced Swift
Things written in it NeXTSTEP macOS

Brad Cox's Objective-C (1984) — Smalltalk's messaging grafted onto C — let you write C that sent messages: [obj method:arg]. Stepstone licensed it; NeXT bought it outright in 1988.\n\nIt was the language of NeXTSTEP, then Cocoa, then all of macOS/iOS until Swift; the 30-year-old ObjC codebase is still Apple's foundation.

Sources

  1. developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ProgrammingWithObjectiveC/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C