Langauge preference is always subjective. That said, IMO: C compatibility is a double-edged sword. For most apps it's more of a liability than a benefit. Alway

Langauge preference is always subjective. That said, IMO: C compatibility is a double-edged sword. For most apps it's more of a liability than a benefit. Always being one pointer error away from writing all over memory is not a good thing. Being forced to manually deal with headers and include directives in 2012 makes me sad. Not necessary in Java/C#/etc. ARC makes memory management a lot less of a pain but you really still need to understand retain/release and weird issues pop in things like blocks, complicating their already ugly (compared to C#/Java lambda, Ruby, Python etc) syntax. Picking apart a long selector invocation takes a lot more effort than just parsing a typical function call. In languages like Python or C# you can use explicit argument labels if you really need them instead of all the time. Collections are going to be less painful with the new literals and autoboxing but they're still really crude compared to C++ stl, for example. Most of what you can accomplish with KVO and notifications can be done with more explicit listener/delegate arrangements and that kind of code is a lot easier to understand too. There's nothing keeping you from doing that in Obj-C but the KVO way is pretty ingrained in Cocoa, just like informal protocols used to be.