Amazing that this isn't voted higher. Regardless of Objective-C's virtues, this the real reason. The decision was made back in the late '80s for NeXTStep, and i

Amazing that this isn't voted higher. Regardless of Objective-C's virtues, this the real reason. The decision was made back in the late '80s for NeXTStep, and it just hasn't been changed since then. Apple was kinda moving toward Java in the early days of Mac OS X — WebObjects was ported to it, and it was a peer language for Cocoa up to Mac OS X 10.4 or something — but Mac users hated Java, as it was dog slow at the time, so Objective-C won by inertia.