Comment by mentos

Same. I realize that Objective-C is dated by contemporary standards. But when I first learned it 20-ish years ago it felt like a superpower. I bet it was even more impressive when it first appeared another 20 years further back.

I think that one of the tragedies of older programming languages is that they survive long enough for people to forget the technical - and technological - constraints that influenced their design. Swift is great, but there are reasons why there weren't any Swift-like languages being developed in or around 1984.

Similar feelings about Java. It is definitely not my favorite programming language. (I suppose Kotlin isn't either, but it's in the top n.) But it's hard for me to actually hate it. Java walked so that Kotlin could run.

I started the iOS development with Objective-C and hated the language. gp's comment is pretty much my feeling as well. I wonder if I'd enjoy Swift so much if it wasn't in contrast to how utterly horrible Objective-C was. These days I still need to revisit legacy Obj-C codebases occasionally or make Obj-C wrappers to interface with C++ code and every time it feels like diving into a cesspit.

I was first introduced to Objective-C in 2010 when I worked on my first iPhone app. I've come back to it a half dozen times over the past 15 years since then and always hate it. I only discovered swift a few years ago (when I had to do some iPhone stuff) and was so happy to not need to use Obj-C