TBH, I think that’s as much accidental as by design. ObjC didn’t do generics until just recently, so the standard collection classes (NSArray, NSDictionary, etc

TBH, I think that’s as much accidental as by design. ObjC didn’t do generics until just recently, so the standard collection classes (NSArray, NSDictionary, etc) couldn’t specify element types so had no choice but to leave those APIs typed as `id` (effectively `void`). Also, being a C, you still have to declare* all the types, even when only `id`, which is tedious AF. Also-also being a C (which doesn’t so much have a type system as a loose set of compiler directives for allocating memory on the stack), it’s not as if declaring exact types does much to improve program correctness. You can still stick any old object into an `NSString*` at runtime; it just dumps stack when you try to send it an NSString-specific message is all. Oh, and one more: the ObjC compiler can have trouble recognizing selectors (method calls) when the receiver’s type is `id`. Being a C, obviously you have to import all the headers just to use them at all, but if in searching those headers it finds two method definitions with the same name but different parameters then its superficially Smalltalk facade quickly breaks down. (I’ve run into this, it’s very annoying.)