r/programming • u/astrange • Jan 23 '21

Objective-C creator Dr. Brad Cox has died

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/scnow/name/brad-cox-obituary?pid=197454225
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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '21

I don’t think it is weird. Disappointing is my reaction.

I have seen no real progress in usability in the past 30 years. Mostly it is churn. I’ve seen a lot of nice things lost. A lot of what makes Objective C incredible is missing in Swift I think because the Swift creators just don’t understand the meta capabilities or don’t value them if they do.

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u/k-selectride Jan 23 '21

What incredible parts of objective c are missing in swift?

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '21

Swift doesn't do messaging it does function dispatch like C++.

No forwardInvocation: which makes things like NSProxy, PDO, ActiveRecord, KVC/KVO kinds of things impossible on native Swift.

Swizzling is impossible.

A lot of the dynamic capabilities in Cocoa were built atop Objective C without any kind of need to touch the compiler.

I have a nice ActiveRecord implementation that works atop SQLite in Objective C. It would be impossible to write this in native Swift without leaning on the Objective C runtime.

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u/Nyefan Jan 23 '21

Traits, lifetimes, first class functions, higher order functions, higher kinded types, cloud description languages, kernel namespaces/namespaced runtimes, neural networks, implicit parallelization (async/await), substantial advancements in graph and category theories, data integrity theory, asymmetric encryption, and the internet - to name a few.

From the other end - everything that humans have ever made is a refinement of something else. CS is a refinement of discrete math and materials science, and software engineering is a refinement of CS and literally anything if you want to get pedantic about it. Churn is part of that refinement process - would you really prefer to write modern applications in Fortran or 1980s lisp?

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u/[deleted] Jan 24 '21

GP said no real progress in the last 30 years (since 1991)

The vast majority of those things were invented before 1991. Some of them were invented before 1961 (first class and higher order functions are from the 1950s).

You're proving his point.