In praise of Objective-C  It is tough to write anything about
Apple without being accused of fanboism, however I really do
admire Objective-C. Originally created at Stepstone it has
become synonymous with Apple's platforms, and I believe it leads
the pack of general purpose programming languages. This is not
something I feel with the fervour of a Lisper defending his or
her parentheses, but Objective-C occupies a market leading
middleground between the performance centric C++ and the
programmer focussed Java.  Java's early press focussed on its
portability, "Write once, run anywhere" was the promise, and it
seemed enough to make Java the programming language of the
internet. It wasn't sufficient; javascript "won", but Java lived
on as a general purpose language. Java's designers had realised
that programmer time was more valuable than CPU time and they
endowed their new language with a vast standard library and
runtime features such as garbage collection. This approach
stuck, and languages are now judged as m