The Subjective Charms of Objective-C

Summary

After inventing calculus, actuarial tables, and the mechanical calculator and coining the phrase “best of all possible worlds,” Gottfried Leibniz still felt his life’s work was incomplete. Since boyhood, the 17th-century polymath had dreamed of creating what he called a characteristica universalis—a language that perfectly represented all scientific truths and would render making new discoveries as easy as writing grammatically correct sentences. This “alphabet of human thought” would leave no room for falsehoods or ambiguity, and Leibniz would work on it until the end of his life.A version of Leibniz’s dream lives on today in programming languages. They don’t represent the totality of the physical and philosophical universe, but instead, the next best thing—the ever-flipping ones and zeroes that make up a computer’s internal state (binary, another Leibniz invention). Computer scientists brave or crazy enough to build new languages chase their own characteristica universalis, a system that could allow developers to write code so expressive that it leaves no dark corners for bugs to hide and so self-evident that comments, documentation, and unit tests become unnecessary.But expressiveness, of course, is as much about personal taste as it is information theory. For me, just as listening to Countdown to Ecstasy as a teenager cemented a lifelong affinity for Steely Dan, my taste in programming languages was shaped the most by the first one I learned on my own—Objective-C.To argue that Objective-C resembles a metaphysically divine language, or even a good language, is like saying Shakespeare is best appreciated in pig latin. Objective-C is, at best, polarizing. Ridiculed for its unrelenting verbosity and peculiar square brackets, it is used only for building Mac and iPhone apps and would have faded into obscurity in the early 1990s had it not been for an unlikely quirk of history. Nevertheless, in my time working as a software engineer in San Francisco in the early 2010s...