Noob here. Where does ObjC fit into all this? I know it's primarily used in Mac development, but is there any language-specific reason it's excluded from these debates?
It is not a terrible language to write in, once you get over the verbosity; it is not, for instance, the waking nightmare that C++ is. But as a deployed system it is the worst attributes of C and of interpreted languages: a complex runtime in which many (probably most) of the errors that can creep into deployable Ruby code can bite you even though your code passed both compilation and static analysis.
Its high-level constructs for the most part share the same reliability issues that C++ has; exceptions, for instance, are not really any safer there than in C++.
Blocks are nice, but I say that having only used them within the past few months. It could just be that the zombies haven't eaten their way to my particular shelter yet. They may, for instance, turn out to be horrible to debug.
Imagine a variant of C or C++ that you have to unit test as vigilantly as Rails code, and you're not far off the mark.
ObjC is a good statically-typed language.
C++ is half a dozen good statically-typed languages, all fighting for supremacy like a ham actor's "multiple-personality-disorder" shtick.
"Statically typed objects have the same internal data structures as objects declared to be of type id. The type doesn't affect the object; it affects only the amount of information given to the compiler about the object and the amount of information available to those reading the source code."
How exactly is Obj-C "good"? Is it safer than C? Perhaps less verbose? Or maybe it's easier to use - libraries aside? Is it better because it runs on more platforms? Because it's standardized?
If all else fails, I think it must be the way that it manages to merge two completely different programming paradigms by just stapling them one onto the other.