On programming languages and the Mac

Every so often I dig out my Xcode stuff and have a go at exploring developing an idea for Mac OS X. Everytime the same thing happens to me: Objective-C is such an offensive language to my sensibilities that I get diverted into doing something else.

All the lessons that we have learned the hard way over the years — the importance of strong static typing, the importance of tools for large scale programming — seem to have fallen on deaf ears in the Objective-C community. How long did it take to get garbage collection into the language? I also feel that some features of Objective-C represent an inherent security risk (in particular categories) that would make me very nervous to develop a serious application in it.

As it happens, I am currently developing a programming language for Complex Event Processing.
Almost every choice that I am making in that language is the opposite to the choice made for Objective-C — my language is strongly, statically typed; it is designed for parallel execution, it uses a functional programming foundation, it is symbolic in nature, designed to permit development of large programs, etc. etc.

Hence my allergic reaction and yet again I veer off into something that does not involve actually making a beautiful application for a platform that I much admire.

I have to also admit that I regret Apple’s choice to abandon Java development. I am not an apologist for Java, but it is significantly better for programming in than Objective-C.

I have heard that some of the features of Cocoa are impossible to do in Java. I have strong doubts about that.

I just wish that Apple’s sense of design extended to the underlying technologies as much as it does to user engineering.