Coincidentally, there is another thread going on right now, "A Eulogy for Objective-C". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10003438 https://news.ycombinator.

Coincidentally, there is another thread going on right now, "A Eulogy for Objective-C". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10003438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10003438 Since Obj-C is considered a descendent of Smalltalk, it's pros and cons are briefly mentioned as to the motivation behind Obj-C. Here's an excerpt: But there was a problem, once again, with this idea of the whole image that took over everything. You had to really swallow the whole Smalltalk build, you had to go all the way in to this world, and you were going to give up everything you had ever done before to become part of the Smalltalk image. Then, when you were done, you would ship this image to people, they would start it up on their computers, and it would take over everything.