In 1994 I was on a team that had one of the few uses of Objective C that had nothing to do with NeXTStep. The Swarm Simulation System[1], an agent based simulat

In 1994 I was on a team that had one of the few uses of Objective C that had nothing to do with NeXTStep. The Swarm Simulation System[1], an agent based simulation toolkit. We used GNU's Objective C implementation and Tcl/Tk (via tclobjc) for the UI. We picked ObjC because we knew we wanted something object oriented but C++ seemed too complicated and too static. ObjC was simple and appealingly dynamic and flexible in its type system. It worked pretty well for us other than the costs of being an oddball language no one knew. But it was simple enough to learn that a fair number of our target audience did. In retrospect I wish we had the courage to use Smalltalk or a Lisp system but at the time that felt too risky. Java was also just beginning to be an option then, but it was still being shown as a toy for making applets and not a real programming language. Also very slow before JITs. I really appreciated that the ObjC runtime was open source and very small. It was quite easy to get in deep and understand what was going on. [1] http://www.swarm.org http://www.swarm.org