Sure it was more elegant, it took its inspiration from SmallTalk after all ;) Of course that lead to a bit of a mixed result. For one, most of the new features

Sure it was more elegant, it took its inspiration from SmallTalk after all ;) Of course that lead to a bit of a mixed result. For one, most of the new features were syntactically isolated to the Obj-C square brackets. On the other hand, within those brackets things were considerably un-C-like. object.method(arg) seems more "native" than [object method:arg]. I actually liked this grafted-on appearance. It was a clear signal that said: Yeah, we're still C, let's not make any illusions about this. By comparison C++ had more delusions of grandeur, almost from the start. This is also why I'm not that fond of almost any changes to Objective-C that were made later, especially by Apple. That includes the various searches for better memory management, but also the property dot syntax. I'm still a bit sad that the Objective-Javascript thing never took off. Way better than most of the added language features since then.