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Comment by pflats | Hacker News Reader

"Apple’s iOS7 support of JavaScript inline with your Objective-C code validates JavaScript as the leading (and only) non proprietary language that is supported within the iOS development environment by the device manufacturer."

Since when is Objective-C proprietary? Apple's given it a few non-standard extensions (i.e. blocks) but that doesn't make it a proprietary language. GCC and Clang are open source.

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It's not really, but there is no point in using it outside Apple platforms. I mean I spent time learning the thing and those skills are completely useless when not working on iOS and not really needed on the Mac in my case.

Well "not being used elsewhere" is different from "proprietary."

Technically true, but Cocoa is proprietary. Is ObjC widely used for anything else?

Check out Apportable.

And proprietary doesn't mean narrowly used. Also open doesn't mean widely used. Bringing Cocoa was a good trial, but doesn't make the text correct.

No it does not make the text correct, people often conflate ObjC and Cocoa. Thanks for mentioning Apportable.

Well, when people talk about ObjC development on Mac and iOS platforms, they generally mean ObjC plus Cocoa or Cocoa Touch.

It's true that ObjC itself isn't what's proprietary, but Cocoa and Cocoa Touch are.

I suppose it is fair to say Objective-C plus Cocoa Touch is proprietary, but why is Javascript plus Cocoa Touch not proprietary in the same context?

You're absolutely right, I had forgotten that that was the original argument.

True on proprietary. I don's know of any impactful use cases for ObjC. However there are some good things about this. The spec can move fast, focus on success in use cases, and also make it easy to conform to 'nice' HIG. In many cases it's nice to not have to worry about these things and just focus on the end app use case. In the end when it comes to iOS and OSX its still Steve Jobs word were just playing in it.

Does OpenStep count? It's a clone of NeXTstep, which is what Cocoa is itself a descendent of

OpenStep is not a clone of NeXTstep, it was the application layer of NeXTstep ported to other kernels. GNUStep is a clone.

You're right, sorry

Cocoa isn't ObjC, it's an Apple-specific framework. Granted, that's a bit of a nit-pick considering the answer to your 2nd question. But ObjC was around before NeXT showed up.

Cocotron [1] is another alternative that can target Windows and even Linux with some exceptions.

[1] http://www.cocotron.org

Or, for that matter, C and C++

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