Take this with a grain of salt because I am surely biased; Objective-C is a great language. I really like the Smalltalk method calling style they've used, and y

Take this with a grain of salt because I am surely biased; Objective-C is a great language. I really like the Smalltalk method calling style they've used, and you can still use C to mess with pointers if you know what you are doing. If one learned Objective-C first it shouldn't be that difficult to switch to any other object-oriented language, other than memorizing the order of variables in every method. (Also, retain/release is hardly uncommon and with ARC the programmer can basically act like everything is garbage collected anyway.) That aside, the price of entry to run on iOS is an excellent objection, as is (to some degree) the lack of code portability. I don't know how simple GNUStep is to get running, but it's certainly not as ubiquitous as all the JVMs.