Sorry just need to vent. I'm a life-long professional developer that has coded for 30 years and worked on all kinds of OS's and hardware. I've been experimenting with some iPhone development recently - this being the fourth time over the years that I have played around with Apples. Each time has been progressively worse and this latest endeavor makes me want to throw every Apple product in my house out the window. This is the most nightmarish platform I have ever worked with!! Just trying to deploy a little app to a phone - I've been swindled into over $500 worth of hardware and software upgrades and I still haven't accomplished it !

Why do they hate developers so much? That is the only conclusion I can come to after my experiences. They really just don't want ANYONE to develop for their platform or else they would not submit us to the horrors of Objective-C, Xcode, Cocoa, iOS, and (worst of all) - their oppressive development policies. Microsoft has plenty of faults, but at least they have a welcoming attitude towards developers.

Apple products may look slick to the masses, but I cannot imagine any sane developer enjoying a Mac.

Yep, I totally agree. Did some experiments with iOS at my old job, so I have an idea (not just hating to hate). The syntax on Objective-C is just retarded and totally unnecessary. People use it because they can make money on iPhone/iPad apps, not because the language or tools are really any good. But, what can you do? If you want to milk the cow you have to get on your knees and squeeze something.

Compared to which language ?

It's not that the syntax is any worse than other languages. It's just unnecessarily different from the typical C++/Java OO syntax that 95% of all software developers are comfortable with. When Objective C came out, C++ was fairly new and Java was not invented yet, so it must have seemed just as good as any other object oriented language. But C++ quickly dominated, won, and was copied my most other languages since then. Apple should have admitted that Objective C was a loser a long time ago and dropped it. It doesn't offer anything new in terms of functionality, so its foreign syntax and structure just serves to confuse and drive away development mind-share. Let's face it. Nobody develops on Mac/iOS for fun, productivity, or research - only for the consumer market that exists there.

As an analogy - Apple's stubbornness to give up on Objective C is just as misguided and myopic as the United States' refusal to convert to metric measurements.

It's weird to say that the Objective-C syntax is unnecessarily different from C++/Java when it has been popular more than a decade before both of them. When the Objective-C language was used as the basis for NeXT in 1988 it was fairly mature, while C++ was merely confidential in its use and Java wasn't even an idea.

C++ didn't quickly dominate, it took a lot of time for it to become popular, starting from 1991 which is the date of its real introduction to the world. The first decent C++ compiler from Microsoft only dates back to 1998 and in 1999 Quake III was still written in C for example.

Apple purchased NeXT three years before that (in 1996) to use their assets as the basis for Mac OS X. At this time this choice made a lot of sense since they had a complete environment to build a new platform : a language, a desktop environment (NeXTstep) and a whole development environment (project builder, interface builder, etc.).

Its syntax is not more foreign than the C++ one, they just used different paradigms. C++ syntax was based on Simula while the Objective-C syntax was based on Smalltalk. There is no syntax intrinsically better than the other, it's just that you are used to the Simula-one and don't want to invest time on the Smalltalk one.

Also the goals of the two languages at their creation were somewhat different, for Objective-C it was reusability, which is very important when you use it in a complete ecosystem like Mac OS X or iOS. For C++ it was large scale development. As always, it's only a question of the right tool for the right job...

I am not advocating that one syntax is inherently better than the other. I am just saying that the people (developers) have overwhelmingly chosen the C++/Java/C# style semantics over Smalltalk. It just seems like a bad business model on the part of Apple to discourage development on their platforms by sticking with this niche language and forcing the extra learning curve. Microsoft understands the benefits of catering to developer needs. They continually change and experiment with a variety of language platforms to encourage wide scale development and adoption.

Well if it makes any difference, you actually can use C++ to develop for iOS: with 3rd party frameworks like Marmalade.

And what I've been trying to explain is that the choice of Objective-C by Apple has been made 16 years ago. At that time it made perfect sense, not only because C++ was style niche but also because it came with a whole desktop and development environment. When you've invested that much into a coherent programming environment you can't go back. And considering the market share Apple products have gained since then, I wouldn't call Objective-C a niche language either.

Looking at Microsoft like an innovator in the computer language field (or any computer-related field for that matter) is quite a big stretch from reality.

If you've been programming for 30 years as you said, you're certainly able to adapt to a different paradigm like the one used in Objective-C. It's still very close to C and even simpler than all the constructs that have been added to it to create C++.

@Fredz: I do see your point about the history of Objective-C. When Apple made the choice it probably made a lot of sense (especially with the amount of money they spent on acquiring those assets). So I can totally see their side of the story. That doesn't mean I have to like it, though.