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Comment by jmole | Hacker News Reader

NeXT invented Objective-C and encouraged its use, and the object-oriented paradigm was as popular back then as rust is today. It was just trendy to do so.

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They did not invent it, it was developed at PPI (later Stepstone), before NeXT was founded.

To a great degree, NeXT was comprised of an assemblage of talent and technologies which Steve Jobs put together:

- Mach microkernel --- Avie Tevanian may well be the most heavily recruited computer science student in history with offers from AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, and NeXT

- Interface Builder --- Jean-Marie Hullot originally did a graphical layout system for developing on the Mac

- Display PostScript --- to a great degree, NeXT was responsible for this

- Objective-C --- as noted elsethread this was worked up by Brad Cox at Stepstone

and, of course they licensed Unix from AT&T (and other bits from other sources such as a Pantone color library, or Webster's dictionary for Webster.app, and Mathematica from Wolfram was included early on).

Wish my Cube hadn't stopped booting up...

>- Display PostScript --- to a great degree, NeXT was responsible for this

Confirm, got to see a live demo at Comdex ATL back in 1992? Mind blown.

Quartz, née Display PDF is a nice alternative (and is probably even more reliable these days), but I still miss Display PostScript and the ability to program custom fills/strokes and so forth --- huge potential security hole as Frank Siegert's "Project Akira" showed though.

Yes. The Computer History Museum has a two part interview with Steve Naroff, one of the engineers who worked on Objective C:

https://youtu.be/ljx0Zh7eidE

https://youtu.be/vrRCY6vwvbU

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