The C safety / smalltalk speed quote probably was quite funny when it was relevant --some decades ago. And all the rest of your "language criticism" is all abo

The C safety / smalltalk speed quote probably was quite funny when it was relevant --some decades ago. And all the rest of your "language criticism" is all about the IDE. Coincidentally all solved by Xcode 4: better autocomplete, automatic fixes, relevant error descriptions, etc. The main problem was GCC --it just didnt provide the info and interfaces to use for real time, AST guidance of the IDE. In XCode 4 Apple implemented all that stuff leveraging LLVM. Apart from that, Xcode < 4 was not a bad IDE by any standard. Worse than Eclipse/VS in several ways, yes. Bad is a stretch. It also has excellent profiling tools, and a great GUI editor (Interface Builder) that gets MVC right. Also: obj-c has had real GC for years by now. And the old scheme, still used in iOS of retain/release in not "barely" but extremely better and easier than C, while maintaining the performance benefits.