Objective-C Fundamentals

appendix C
Alternatives to Objective-C
Steve Jobs, one of the original founders of Apple Inc., has overseen a number of
innovations and exciting products in the computer industry since Apple was
founded in 1976.
Two of the most recent of these are undoubtedly the iPhone and iPad. There’s
no denying that the iPhone has made an impact on the smartphone marketplace.
Software developers, device manufacturers, and telecommunication carriers can
attribute to the iPhone’s presence at least some kind of impact on or change in
their industries, whether it’s an increased interest in innovative and visually appealing
UIs or the increased use of cellular data services and downloadable content.
If the iPhone is your first foray into a platform developed by Apple, the required
development tools and languages are likely to feel foreign and perhaps even esoteric
or antiquated compared to your current platform because of their rather different
origins.
Much as the iPhone hardware can trace its roots to a long line of prior iPod
devices, Objective-C and Cocoa Touch can follow their long lineage and history
back more than 25 years. The iPhone is as much a culmination and refinement of
existing technologies as it is a breakthrough design.
In this appendix we discuss some of the alternatives to developing iOS applications
in Objective-C, but first, it’s important to understand the origins of Objective-C.
C.1 A short history of Objective-C
The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a lot of experimentation in improving software
developers’ productivity and the reliability of the systems they were producing. One
train of thought was that gains could be found with a shift from procedural-based programming
languages to languages incorporating object-oriented design principles.
Smalltalk, a language developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, was the first to
introduce the term object-oriented programming to the general developer community.
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