That's really funny. I have a similar riff about punch-cards and the "grumpy old man" sketch from classic SNL.

Some say Objective C isn't very objective, just like the mac users, ha! :) Cheap shot, couldn't resist. The more I try to program in ObjC, the more it feels like torture. VS has rotten my brain.

re: ObjC on the Mac. I think the weird syntax did it in. It's a really nice language. With the Garbage collection coming with ObjC 2.0 in Leopard, it should be a lot nicer.

You know who the real curmudgeons are? Old LISP programmers. They look at the Smalltalkers and say, "Yeah and LISP had that before you guys did. Get off our lawn!"

I recently started playing around with Objective C and Cocoa and it really is a very nice language.  And the cocoa frameworks truelly are impressive.  Granted, the syntax at first kinda put me off, but once you're used to it, it actually looks pretty good.

Regarding the garbage collection in Objective C... i kinda have mixed feelings about it.  Memory management in Objective C is actually pretty easy if you just follow these rules: developer.apple.com/.../MemoryManagementRules.html

The rules are pretty simple, and most Cocoa developers really understand how memory management works, which IMHO is always a good thing.  It's also not that difficult to actually implement proper memory management in your cocoa code so it's not like you're wasting a lot of time with it.

Because Nestor was old and crusty he didn't go out and fight Hector and instead picked Ajax in his place.

Hmm, there's got to be a joke in there somewhere...

Oh, and don't mistakenly type "SmallTalk", they hate that capital 'T'!  But seriously, Smalltalkers are tame compared to Lispers.  Heck, anything interesting was already done 30 years ago by Lisp.  Expert systems? Lisp.  Lots of Insane Symmetrical Parentheses.  Lisp.

As to Objective-C, it was developed independently of C++ with NeXT as its star platform.  GNU had a compiler that would let you work with Objective-C on Unix, but the libraries are what makes the tool--and tool vendors were sold on C++ as the object oriented C deviant.  Since NeXT didn't catch on, neither did Objective-C.  Until Apple took over NeXT, that is.

Objective-C only used by Macs? ... I've even heard rumours that Apple trying to trademark Objective-C as their brand. Maybe that also shows the narrow ambition on target platform. Checkout: www.appleinsider.com/article.php

But I like Objective-C and Cocoa. However, Objective-C has no implicit this pointer, so you always need to write [self myMethod], c.p. like always writing this->myMethod() in C#/C++.

Objective-C is lika a "syntax flora" on top of C, althought the gcc compiler is standalone. In theory, one could create Objective-C#.