> Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture

Objective-C was actually created by a company called Stepstone that wanted what they saw as the productivity benefits of Smalltalk (OOP) with the performance and portability of C. Originally, Objective-C was seen as a C "pre-compiler".

One of the companies that licensed Objective-C was NeXT. They also saw pervasive OOP as a more productive way to build GUI applications. That was the core value proposition of NeXT.

NeXT ended up basically taking over Objective-C and then it became of a core part of Apple when Apple bought NeXT to create the next-generation of macOS (the one we have now).

So, Objective-C was actually born attempting to "use standards" (C instead of Smalltalk) and really has nothing to do with Apple culture. Of course, Apple and NeXT were brought into the world by Steve Jobs

> Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture.

What language would you have suggested for that mission and that era? Self or Smalltalk and give up on performance on 25-MHz-class processors? C or Pascal and give up an excellent object system with dynamic dispatch?

C.

C's a great language in 1985, and a great starting point. But development of UI software is one of those areas where object oriented software really shines. What if we could get all the advantages of C as a procedural language, but graft on top an extremely lightweight object system with a spec of < 20 pages to take advantage of these new 1980s-era developments in software engineering, while keeping 100% of the maturity and performance of the C ecosystem? We could call it Objective-C.

And Objective-C is C. A strict superset, in fact.

If

   [aView display];

really, really, really isn't to your liking, you can write

   objc_msgSend( aView, @selector(display)); 

or even:

   objc_msgSend( aView, sel_registerName("display"));

That's pretty much all there is to it. But I have to admit I like the syntax better:

   [aView display];

(Hi mpw)

(Hi Adam, how's the flying?)