Well, nobody's going to tout "Our language was inspired by this weird, unpopular little thing that lost hard to C++" in their marketing materials, which was pre

Well, nobody's going to tout "Our language was inspired by this weird, unpopular little thing that lost hard to C++" in their marketing materials, which was pretty much the perception of Objective-C among the few who knew about it at the time. Remember, in those days, C++ was king — it was basically "the programming language for grown-ups" in a lot of people's minds — so Sun wanted to encourage that association above all others, even if it wasn't really where the designers' heart lay.