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).