- namespaces

- memory safe

- you don't have to type @ and [] everywhere to switch between dynamic and static worlds

As for the vm thing, there are also commercial native compilers, even though the general HNer tend not to be aware of them.

Thus giving Android developers all the fun of dealing with GC pauses. There's a lot to be said for ARC, really; I'm quit glad Apple ditched their brief experiment with ObjC GC.

> namespaces

I'll give you that one; lack of namespaces it the worst thing about ObjC.

> ... Dynamic and static worlds...

I'm not sure what you mean here; Java is a statically typed language, and does not have a 'dynamic world'. ObjC has a fo of optional dynamic typing, which is arguably modern, though also only arguably a good thing.

Because they failed to implement a GC that didn't crash all the time, as the Apple forums used to testify before ARC was touted as the best thing since sliced bread.

The wonders of mixing Objective-C libraries compiled in mixed mode.

> I'm not sure what you mean here;

The mixed nature of Objective-C.

With @ and [] one is in Smalltalk land. Without them, one is in C world.

> Java is a statically typed language, and does not have a 'dynamic world'.

Yes it has, via reflection, annotations and dynamic bytecode generation.

This is an odd and not particularly true way of looking at things. [] (for message sending), is merely some syntactic sugar for the objc_msgsnd function call.

A means of gathering the code, dump it into a series of objc_msgsnd, without doing much of real compiler work.

There are languages with Smalltalk semantics without forcing me to type @ and [] multiple times per line, a pain in non US keyboards.

    id map = @{ @"my key": @123};

ImmutableMap.builder().put("my key", 123).build();

Which hardly seems neater (especially in a more realistic case where you have more than one entry).