pnathan on software

Looking at ObjectiveC today. I don't think it's a bad language. A bit weird. The combination of run-time dispatch + compilation is a strange one. I gather that it was an originally a C preprocessor. This shows in odd ways, especially with the reference counter system. The function declaration/call syntax is, IMO, a bit of a disaster. Square brackets, colons, etc. I keep reading the square brackets as Lispy brackets, where the function comes first, rather than Smalltalk brackets, where the object comes first.

Semantically I fear that dereferencing a nil pointer will be a big deal; run-time type errors are something I expect will become a big deal in my future.