It’s not puke inducing, but it is verbose. The language designers just took a different approach to how to write code. Just for some background, it came out at a similar time to c++. Both were designed to be a ‘better c’
In terms of reading code, its verbosity mainly affects the horizontal dimension, which is strongly mitigated by the proliferation of large widescreen displays.
In terms of learning the language, the verbosity combined with the autocomplete arguably reduced the need to continually refer back to documentation, as the verbose method (message) names were oftentimes self explanatory.
This is all laid out in great detail in the wonderful Object Oriented Programming: an Evolutionary Approach.
- (void):(id)param1 :(id)param2 :(id)param3
Keyword names do not have to be unique such as:
- (void)drawLine:(id)gfxContext x:(double)x1 y:(double)y1 x:(double)x2 y:(double)y2
Cocoa/Cocoa Touch is verbose, but Objective-C is not (it is by far my favorite programming language)
There's a lot of colons here too:
- (id)outputImageProviderFromBufferWithPixelFormat:(NSString *)format
pixelsWide:(NSUInteger)width
pixelsHigh:(NSUInteger)height
baseAddress:(const void *)baseAddress
bytesPerRow:(NSUInteger)rowBytes
releaseCallback:(QCPlugInBufferReleaseCallback)callback
releaseContext:(void *)context
colorSpace:(CGColorSpaceRef)colorSpace
shouldColorMatch:(BOOL)colorMatch;