Objective-C

Chapter 1. Introducing Objective-C

In This Chapter

• Learning about Objective-C history

• Exploring Xcode for writing Objective-C Code

• Configuring your development environment

The year was 1986. Halley's Comet was the closest to the sun that it had been in 75 years. The United Kingdom and France announced plans to construct the Channel Tunnel. Polaroid was all the rage and had just recently forced Kodak to leave the instant camera business. The C programming language had been in use for about 15 years, but C++ was a newcomer to the field, and barely known. The Smalltalk programming language had been making the rounds in the technology industry and getting people excited about a new concept in programming called object-oriented programming, or OOP for short.

Two developers, Tom Love and Brad Cox had been exposed to Smalltalk while at ITT Corporation's Programming Technology Center. Cox thought that it would be interesting to add object-oriented features to the C programming language, enabling object-oriented programming in C. In fact, he called his extension to COOPC, which stood for object-oriented programming in C. Eventually, the two formed a company to commercialize these extensions and market them as a language to developers. The name of this new language was changed to Objective-C. A few years later, a tiny startup headed by Steve Jobs, called NeXT, licensed and standardized Objective-C as the primary language that they wanted to use to develop a new operating system called NeXTstep. ...