This is truly not meant to be a snarky comment, but why is it so overtly verbose? I left Java years ago b/c it was making my fingers arthritic it seems. It doesn't look like much fun. Sure, IDEs do autocomplete, but still requires parsing by the human eye.

I'm sure you get used to it. Every language looks horrible the first time, then you learn to live with it and maybe love it, but on first glance that looks pretty awful.

Objective-C tends to err on the side of readability. Considering that source code is read many more times than it is written it's something I personally agree with. But yeah it's something you do get used to.

Java's problem is that C# exists and is a more expressive language.

But this isn't readable at all.

If you compare it JSON.parse(x) or fromJSON x it's just awful.

The idea that more verbose == more readable is so annoying. It seems to be especially egregious in languages like Ada, which look like this to me (an uninitiated):

    okay here comes a function definition get ready
      function MyFun() begin
        return 1
      end begin
      end MyFun
    end function okay we are done

Verbosity is part of the design philosophy behind Objective-C.