The silver lining to being crushed by Microsoft's illegal tactics where Apple survived: 20+ years later, we don't have to justify the design decisions that went into the now-forgotten GoC. Some parts of Apple's Objective-C have not aged well, and I find myself smirking at the ancient voices echoing through its documentation.
Objective-C uses long names for things. Where most languages that needed to append strings together might name a string method "append", the Objective-C equivalent is "stringByAppendingString". They were proud of these long names. "This is one of the features that helps make Objective-C such a readable language," the documentation proudly states. And yet, you know they don't still believe this. A few years back, Apple designed a new programming language, Swift. Rather than re-write all of their interfaces from scratch, they wrote a tool to do some automatic translation. But this tool didn't just translate the code-ish parts. It also translated the names: it looked for some common wordy idioms in Objective-C names and shortened them for Swift.
(Though some parts of Objective-C remind me of GoC, over-long names weren't part of that… Probably because GeoWorks was a company of assembly-language hackers who were used to to keeping track of things called ax and bx.)
Anyhow, it's been a nostalgic time, thinking about messages and properties and such. I feel like the old town native talking to new arrivals. "You kids today have no idea what this place was like back then. I remember when those properties were just fields."
