Most of the silliness about Objective is (I think) based on an unwillingness to admit that GUI's written in one's favorite scripting language or Java are still

Most of the silliness about Objective is (I think) based on an unwillingness to admit that GUI's written in one's favorite scripting language or Java are still too slow. I think Obj C add just the right amount of sugar to plain C for GUI and OOP, while its cousin C++ has WAY too much sugar (insulin shock!); both of these are screamingly fast after compilation. So saying "I would rather write it in Ruby/Python/Perl/Lua/Java/blah/blah/blah" is just ridiculous, at least with today's tech. Sure -- I would rather write an SS7 switch in Bash, but that just doesn't matter. Oh -- and the fact that small minded programmers freak out when something is different (brackets, as an OP says, or 0 versus 1 indexing, etc) (Note -- if you want to max programmer speed (in Lines of Code) for GUI's, you want to use a language even uncooler than Obj C: Tcl/Tk...)