That assumes a lot. It assumes the user has knowledge of the thousands of extensions in use and what they mean, and that he knows what app they are mapped to.

I could make a political point about how kickstarter and its kin are a response to laws that limit risky investments by all except the wealthy and the effect of "the closure" in Venice in the 14th centuary.

That sounds interesting; go for it.

"Apple has not shipped a single API on Mac or iOS written in Swift. "

Apple has specifically designed Swift so that if the day comes that they are writing APIs in Swift instead of Objective-C, YOU WON'T EVEN KNOW. They have the same internal object model and memory layout. They are basically the same language with a different syntax. (Not quite, but it's not too far off).

And while Apple might not have declared Objective-C dead, people who've seen how Apple operate before can clearly see the writing on the wall.

To some extent it's true you can learn syntax in a few days. HOWEVER, learning to think in a paradigm is a different matter. How long to pick up Scheme syntax? An hour. How long to change your brain to think in Scheme, and not in C/Java/C++/C# ? Well that's a whole different matter.

The [[[][]]][] in Objective-C are an extremely simple concept to grasp. The same can't be said for all the >< in C++.

LOL, you just gave me deja-vu about my previous life as a C++ programmer.

Is Sather still alive and kicking? I thought it was dead. Come to that I thought Eiffel was dead.

Hmm, in my experience few people use C++ any more.

I might add that well designed programs don't generally open and close resources in lots of places in the code. They will abstract that out and have it done in only a few places.

Yes, as has been pointed out, Java since V7 now has try with resources to auto-close stuff. It's not like you can be totally oblivious in C++ either, you can easily lose resources too if you're pathologically stupid.

Errm, I probably would say Java IS the Swiss army knife of programming languages. Jack of all trades, but master of none. Java might not give you the best result, but it will probably give you less aggravation getting there than most anything else, simply because it is easy to get working and running everywhere, there are a ton of libraries existing, and the compile and link model is simply easier to work with.

You've probably got more chance in OS-X than most anything else. What do you advocate, CICS mainframe?

You _can_ write very efficient code, and you _can_ write very concise code, but the mental effort required to make all that happen means that few people think it is worth the effort.

Err, well you've got to write the core code in _something_, and why not Objective-C? You can compile it for any platform you like, and I'm a big proponent of sticking to one programming language for everything. You lose a lot by shifting between paradigms and being unable to pass objects around between different layers. Most likely Apple's iTunes for Windows is written in Objective-C and it works for them. Objective-C is a pretty thin layer around C, and at least in the old days, just preprocessed it into C, so it isn't inherently less portable than C.

As someone who did some programming in Sather, which explicitly split up interface and implementation inheritance, I don't know how you justify the claim that implementation inheritance is "a broken concept".