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My first programming job used Objective C to make an iOS app. Back in 2013 XCode was pretty fast. My naive youthful self enjoyed using Objective C's Categories

My first programming job used Objective C to make an iOS app. Back in 2013 XCode was pretty fast. My naive youthful self enjoyed using Objective C's Categories and Associated Objects to share some UI code across 2 UIViewControllers. Did I get it to work? yep. Did it make senior programmers a bit nervous? yep. I wrote a blog post about it. Later, I got to use Java for some Android apps, and after that we got Swift. XCode seemed to get slower with swift and Java(android) was more a limited language. No complaints, but it was just not as fun and easy as using Objective C. (in my naive beginner opinion) Things were a lot simpler back then. I'll never forget my joy learning Objective C at my first ever programming job. RIP Brad Cox

dep_b 6y ago
You weren't naive. Objective-C is so much better suited to do GUI applications than Java. Plus you could dip into the performance of C where it mattered most. Also while Objective-C (when used idiomatically) was slower than Java, it was consistently and reproducibly slow around reference counting while Java itself decided when and where it was time to do a full garbage collection cycle. And of course only now languages like Rust and Swift are feasible given the fact they do so much compile time checking. But that makes your IDE a lot slower compared to Objective-C.