I got started with WebObjects, a Next product a couple years before Apple bought them. Yes I've written wonderfully powerful web applications in Objective-C back when the rest of the web was being built using CGI and Perl scripts.
I loved Smalltalk and I love Objective-C at a deep level. The Objective-C runtime is incredibly powerful and its method dispatch is astonishingly efficient considering what it does. It is not as fast as vtables, but it isn't as fragile either.
It might well interest you to know that WebObjects (I'm talking 1997 here) ran on HP-UX, SunOS, AIX, and one other popular Unix of the day that slips my mind and it too shipped with a lively scripting language called WebScript which was not so different from a minimal Swift today.
The thing is, once you dig into the Objective-C runtime and spend a bit of time trying to write an interpreter, you start to realize that the interpreter almost writes itself. Swift is far from the first language built atop the Objective-C runtime.
Consider FScript (http://www.fscript.org) has been around for well over a decade and does more or less the same thing except it gives you something closer to Smalltalk than Javascript and it includes some advanced matrix manipulation goodies as well.
The majority of the people squealing with glee over the introduction to Swift seem to be the sort of people I wouldn't care to work with. If a bit of syntax puts you off so much, lord help you when a truly new paradigm hits.
Swift looks to have some nice features, but it seems to be missing the low level access to the runtime that advanced developers can use like default message handlers (forwardInvocation:/doesNotUnderstand:/methodForSelector: kinds of stuff) and the ability to fiddle method dicts at runtime which can be very useful for intercepting strange errors and unexpected code paths.
So, yes, I do LOVE Objective-C. It is my second favorite language to work in after Smalltalk and to those claiming that Swift will help them move over from Android because it less verbose - lets remember Java is the most boilerplate per capability language I've seen since COBOL. I don't know what those people are talking about.
I loved Smalltalk and I love Objective-C at a deep level. The Objective-C runtime is incredibly powerful and its method dispatch is astonishingly efficient considering what it does. It is not as fast as vtables, but it isn't as fragile either.
It might well interest you to know that WebObjects (I'm talking 1997 here) ran on HP-UX, SunOS, AIX, and one other popular Unix of the day that slips my mind and it too shipped with a lively scripting language called WebScript which was not so different from a minimal Swift today.
The thing is, once you dig into the Objective-C runtime and spend a bit of time trying to write an interpreter, you start to realize that the interpreter almost writes itself. Swift is far from the first language built atop the Objective-C runtime.
Consider FScript (http://www.fscript.org) has been around for well over a decade and does more or less the same thing except it gives you something closer to Smalltalk than Javascript and it includes some advanced matrix manipulation goodies as well.
The majority of the people squealing with glee over the introduction to Swift seem to be the sort of people I wouldn't care to work with. If a bit of syntax puts you off so much, lord help you when a truly new paradigm hits.
Swift looks to have some nice features, but it seems to be missing the low level access to the runtime that advanced developers can use like default message handlers (forwardInvocation:/doesNotUnderstand:/methodForSelector: kinds of stuff) and the ability to fiddle method dicts at runtime which can be very useful for intercepting strange errors and unexpected code paths.
So, yes, I do LOVE Objective-C. It is my second favorite language to work in after Smalltalk and to those claiming that Swift will help them move over from Android because it less verbose - lets remember Java is the most boilerplate per capability language I've seen since COBOL. I don't know what those people are talking about.