I spent my commute home today listening to John Siracusa and Guy English talk about how Objective C is getting old in the tooth. A topic, of course, that Siracusa has addressed a few times; as you would expect, it was a thoughtful discussion, I’m glad I listened to it.

And I really am curious about the answer there. I’m no Objective C expert, but it seems like it’s going to be an issue at some point in the not horribly distant future. But it seems like a lot of the standard solutions that I’m used to would be potentially problematic from the way Apple seems from the outside to approach things: in particular, a solution that bakes in a VM with full garbage collection into its foundations seems a little unlikely to me? I’m not aware of existing new languages that feel to me like they’d be a great fit for Apple, but that doesn’t mean much, I haven’t kept up well with modern trends in that area. Which could mean that Apple will do an Apple-style thing and invent their own solution; the question then becomes whether they have the language design chops to do an Apple-quality job of that. (Which I’m not at all convinced of.)

I dunno. The next time I’m on the job market, I should see if I have contacts over there who could hook me up with people who might be working on that. It could be a very interesting way to spend time, and one in which my own particular skills could find a useful role?

Post Revisions:

This post has not been revised since publication.