I wouldn't say Objective-C is supposed to be "a better C", just different, and better. They're quite different (besides the obvious fact that Objective-C is indeed a superset of C). C is a statically typed procedural language while Objective-C is a very dynamic object oriented language with optional static typing.

It's really quite elegant if you think about it. It's a highly dynamic language that was designed more than 20 years ago and is still very relevant today as the platform of choice for developing nearly all Mac OS X and iPhone apps. As far as dynamic languages go it's very fast since it's compiled. It integrates seamlessly with C (and even C++).

Just because you don't know or care about Objective-C doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people who do. I regularly see articles about Objective-C on the front page of Hacker News, Reddit, etc.

I didn't dispute the potential of Objective-C being better and more useful. What I said, is that although Objective-C may be better it never got more popular than the original.

Therefore although their effort with what they call Objective-J may be worthwhile, it's certain it will never go mainstream.

One significant reason? It runs toooo slow on IE. IF it ever gets fast, maybe more people will give it a shot.

Hm, isn't it only relevant because Apple forces people to use it? If there was a public vote for the programming language for the iPhone, would people really vote for Objective-C?

Perhaps, but if it were really that undesirable of a language would Apple have chosen it as their platform of choice?

And it's certainly not stopping people from writing apps. There's now more than 10,000 apps on the iPhone App Store alone.