I don't think these are the real problems with Objective-C. To quickly address this issues, before discussing the real problems: "Ugly" - get over it, "Verbose

I don't think these are the real problems with Objective-C. To quickly address this issues, before discussing the real problems: "Ugly" - get over it, "Verbose" - get over it, "Memory Management" - Obj-C memory management is in fact super simple as long as you follow some really simple rules, especially with ARC. Now the real problems I have: 1. Lots of unnecessary code. With the old runtime, you had to modify your code at four (!) places to introduce a new property in a class. With the new runtime, that has decreased to three, with ARC, to only 2, but that's still one more than what should really be necessary (@synthetize should go). 2. The whole header file thing. I know that Obj-C is a descendant and strict superset of C but I still find separating header files from .m files somewhat tedious and unnecessary. This leads to 3. Having to declare methods and properties before you use them. I mean, this is 2011, this shouldn't be necessary. 4. The syntax for having "private" methods and properties is awkward even by Obj-C standards. Basically you have to create an anonymous category in the implementation file. 5. Properties (with ARC) should default to strong for objects, assign for everything else. 6. The [[X alloc] init] way to construct objects; I understand that from a theoretical point of view it's cool to separate allocation from initialisation but I've never ever needed to allocate an object with anything other than the alloc message. 7. The debugger. GDB and Xcode are atrocious. Have a look at the C# debugger in Visual Studio; that's how a debugger should look like. Overall, while a lot has been improved recently in Obj-C, my main gripes with the language all come from the facts that it's a C superset (which is also a massive advantage) and that it's an almost 30 years old language; the programming world was very different 30 years ago.