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Comment by koito17 | Hacker News Reader

Yup, Objective-C's object system was really flexible and powerful to use. Dynamic mixins, swizzling, etc. were all useful tools for me. Having messages as first-class citizens was probably the most important part to me. It helps make the object system expressive enough that I don't remember writing much design patterns ;)

But seriously though, CLOS and Smalltalk-style OOP is probably the only flavor of OOP I really enjoy to use, and Objective-C gets you way closer to that than C++ and Java do. (e.g. the way KVO is implemented relies on "isa-swizzling", or dynamically changing classes at runtime)

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Java is more like Objective-C and Smalltalk, than C++. It only took the syntax from the latter, the semantics and dynamism are from the former and reflect the authors experience with Objective-C frameworks at Sun.

Even JavaEE was initially born as a Objective-C framework, Distributed Objects Everywhere.

It's a false dichotomy to dislike OOP or prefer it. It's like saying I prefer hammers over screwdrivers. Just learn how the tools you have should be used and use them well.

The only app I'm currently maintaining and proud of[1] makes tons of use of "traditional" OOP. It uses lambdas and FP when necessary. I think it makes absolutely no use of JavaScript's dynamic features. I'm fairly sure this code would port easily to ObjC.

After 15-20 years, you just get bored of doing things in novel or "pure" ways, and do the bare minimum needed to get the job done that's in front of you.

[1] https://github.com/sdegutis/immaculatalibrary.com

I am not sure if you understood my post. I am in no way saying "OOP is bad in general" or even "OOP is good in general". What I am saying is "I strongly prefer Objective-C's object system over that of other languages." Then I provided examples of other object systems I liked, and how Objective-C feels close enough to them that I don't miss them when writing Objective-C.

Maybe saying "flavor of OOP" was too vague, but I am talking about implementations of object systems, not the (ill-defined) notion of OOP.

Using your analogy with hammers and screwdrivers, my post is less "I prefer screwdrivers over hammers" and more "I prefer screwdrivers with bit holders over screwdrivers without bit holders"

There’s still many people who regard OO in Objective-C as “purer” OO than, say, Java (or something like “the correct way”, whatever that means). I think that’s what they were referring to.

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