Objective-C

ELI5 — The Vibe Check

Objective-C is the language Apple used before Swift, and it looks like C and Smalltalk had a baby during a bracket sale. It's verbose, it's quirky, and millions of lines of iOS code still speak it fluently.

Real Talk

A general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to C. Objective-C was the primary language for macOS and iOS development before Swift, and massive amounts of Apple's frameworks and legacy codebases still use it.

Show Me The Code

NSMutableArray *names = [NSMutableArray new];
[names addObject:@"Alice"];
[names addObject:@"Bob"];

for (NSString *name in names) {
    NSLog(@"Hello, %@!", name);
}

When You'll Hear This

"Half the iOS codebase is still Objective-C — we can't rewrite everything to Swift overnight." / "Objective-C's bracket syntax is wild, but you get used to it... eventually."