After inventing calculus, actuarial tables, the mechanical calculator, and coining the phrase “best of all possible worlds,” Gottfried Leibniz remained unsatisfied with his achievements. Since his youth, the 17th-century polymath had envisioned creating what he termed a characteristica universalis—a language capable of perfectly representing all scientific truths, making new discoveries as straightforward as writing grammatically correct sentences. This "alphabet of human thought" was intended to eliminate falsehoods and ambiguity, a pursuit that occupied Leibniz until his final days.
A modern adaptation of Leibniz’s vision exists today within programming languages. While they do not encapsulate the entirety of the physical and philosophical universe, they serve a crucial function by forming the ever-flipping ones and zeroes of a computer’s binary system—another invention attributed to Leibniz. Computer scientists, ambitious or audacious enough to develop new languages, pursue their own characteristica universalis. These systems aspire to allow developers to create code so expressive that it eliminates potential hiding spots for bugs and becomes so transparent that supplementary comments, documentation, and unit tests become redundant.
However, the notion of expressiveness encompasses both personal taste and information theory. For one individual, just as listening to Countdown to Ecstasy during teenage years sparked a lifelong appreciation for Steely Dan, their preference for programming languages was predominantly influenced by the first one they mastered independently—Objective-C.
Arguing that Objective-C resembles a metaphysically perfect language, or even a good one, would be akin to suggesting Shakespeare is best appreciated in Pig Latin. Objective-C is a divisive language, criticized for its excessive verbosity and unusual square-bracket syntax. It is primarily used for developing Mac and iPhone applications and might have become obsolete in the early 1990s if not for a fortunate twist of events. Nonetheless, during the early 2010s, one software engineer often found themselves defending its more cumbersome design choices in social settings in San Francisco or online discussions.
Objective-C became relevant to this individual at a pivotal moment. As a senior college student who had developed an interest in computer science too late to major in it, they noticed they lagged behind younger peers in basic software engineering classes. Despite the growing prevalence of smartphones, their institution offered no mobile development courses, indicating a potential niche. The individual learned Objective-C over the summer using a series of cowboy-themed instructional books titled The Big Nerd Ranch. Witnessing their code illuminate pixels on a small screen for the first time instilled a deep appreciation for Objective-C, offering an intoxicating sense of unlimited self-expression and the belief in the ability to create anything conceivable—until the allure began to fade.
Objective-C emerged during the early, frenetic days of the object-oriented programming era, a period it arguably should not have outlasted. By the 1980s, software projects had increased in complexity beyond the capacity of a single person or team. To simplify collaboration, Xerox PARC computer scientist Alan Kay developed object-oriented programming, organizing code into reusable components termed "objects" that interact through "messages." For instance, a programmer could create a Timer object capable of handling messages such as start, stop, and readTime, which could then be adapted for different software programs. Back in the 1980s, there was significant excitement about object-oriented programming, and new languages emerged regularly, with some computer scientists suggesting the advent of a "software industrial revolution."
In 1983, software engineers Tom Love and Brad Cox, affiliated with International Telephone & Telegraph, combined object-oriented programming with the popular and comprehensible syntax of the C programming language to develop Objective-C. They established a short-lived firm to license the language and sell object libraries. However, before the company dissolved, it secured a client that would prevent the language from fading into obscurity: NeXT, the computing firm Steve Jobs founded after leaving Apple. Upon Jobs’ return to Apple in 1997, he introduced NeXT’s operating system along with Objective-C. For the subsequent 17 years, Cox and Love’s creation would become instrumental in powering the products of one of the world’s most influential technology corporations.
The software engineer encountered Objective-C a decade and a half later, witnessing how objects and messages adopted a sentence-like structure, punctuated by square brackets, such as [self.timer increaseByNumberOfSeconds:60]. These structures were not akin to Hemingway’s succinct sentences; rather, they were lengthy, elaborate, Proustian constructs, syntactically intricate and vividly descriptive with function names like scrollViewDidEndDragging:willDecelerate.
