Made me chuckle. Objective-C was my _first_ language. When I say first, I mean it was the first one I put any effort into learning when I was in 7th grade or so. It was chaos and the only way I managed to get any apps out the door was basically pattern-matching what people did in stack overflow.
I wouldn't wish Obj-C as a first language on any soul. Swift on the other hand? Jokes aside, that's a beautiful language.
Sure, but that was intentional: the assumption was that you had already learned C. Objective-C is a great language if you know C and you want a SmallTalk-style message dispatch runtime.
It was better before ObjC 2.0; dot syntax makes it hard to tell out of context what a line of code is doing, which was never a problem with the original language.
It was also better before UIKit; The killer app is Interface Builder, which is unbelievably painful to use with UIKit compared to how it used to be with pre-CoreAnimation, pre-autolayout AppKit.
It's been many years since Obj-C was relevant to my life, but I remember reading about some of the implementation details in the runtime and just absolutely boggling. Not in a bad way, a "wow, they've really done about as much as anyone could possibly do to get this performant" way. Distinct mental image of starting at a nice clean relativistic scale and then zooming down into quantum nuttery.
We need a Powers of Ten with programming languages.
