I'm given to understand Dr Brad Cox died this month. I didn't know the name, but after learning he received the primary credit for creating Objective-C, I was instantly aware I knew much of his legacy. Cox developed the language in the 1980s and would later license it to NeXT, sending it on its journey toward its golden age as the main language used for macOS and iOS apps. When sitting down to learn from scratch how to develop for Apple platforms ten years ago (after a childhood with only a little AmigaBASIC, Hypertalk and HTML), Objective-C was the language whose concepts were the first more sophisticated prgramming concepts I struggled to grasp.

I suppose the most recognizably "flagship" trait of Objective-C is object-orientedness, which in hindsight seems so much like a fundamental right answer that two of the most commonly-used web programming languages, JavaScript and PHP – neither of which were originally designed with this concept at front of mind – have since evolved their own object-oriented tendencies.

There are other traits special to Objective-C which I imagine are more consciously appreciated by people who learned to program before it appeared. In my own hindsight, its syntax was also one of the strangest compared to that of other languages (for example, sending an object a "message" in square brackets, such as [waiter takeOrder]), but for a few years, it was my first and only real impression of the way many such things were done.

Since I started out with that, I've loved learning about computer history through reading current manuals, riffling through remnants of surviving communiqués and exchanged on the earlier web, and watching some of the videos churned up on YouTube, but it had never occurred to me to ask where this particular language came from. I'm sorry I missed you, Doctor Cox. That was quite a contribution.