> It pretty much manages memory for you with ARC, Objective-C added ARC relatively late, about 2010 or 2011 or so, and giving people a decade to stew with man

> It pretty much manages memory for you with ARC, Objective-C added ARC relatively late, about 2010 or 2011 or so, and giving people a decade to stew with manual memory management isn't going to endear people to your language, especially when your competitors (C++, Java) have something, even if not great (the less said about std::auto_ptr, the better). > ObjC added about two dozen keywords to C and was rejected by the masses for use of [] insteqd of (). Is it really massively different to type: The square brackets are a vestige of Smalltalk, and it gives Objective-C a feeling of someone smashing Smalltalk into C and not really caring about the consequences. And it really doesn't help that Smalltalk itself had a pretty poor reputation by that point in time.