But %-prefixed comments don't appear in the output, only in the source code. So they can stay there happily ever after, no problem.

No one forces you to make apps for Android (that would qualify as torture anyway I guess)

Back then you had a choice of platform, today you have a choice too. It's certainly easy to bring a "I'm awesome" to the screen with Xcode and Swift.

And by the way, I was talking about BASIC and assembler/machine language. The latter certainly wasn't less complex than setting up the ADT in Eclipse (but probably more fun anyway).

That's why we extended the feature set ourselves with BASIC and assembler...

Actually, the kids from 1975 are the ones who invented smartphones, PDF and the Internet.

That could be nice. However, Glass does not overlay anything at the moment. It's more like a small screen in a corner of your vision, you have to look "up there". Augmented reality certainly has a future. But Google Glass in its current incarnation is not it.

Those could help us solve all the other problems faster and better. Or well, at least be our new overlords...

Well, even a 5% market share would be much more than a 1.5% market share and hence plenty to kill. Although in markets as the US it is probably closer to 10%.

OS X had already killed Linux on the desktop when Ubuntu didn't even exist yet.

I saw that one coming... ;-)

I actually use a mouse with the right hand and a magic trackpad on the left hand (with different gestures). Very efficient, at least for me.

Looks like you might have missed NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP during the 90s... :)

Woohoo, this is great news! Ah wait... it's 2012, not 1999...

I'm always happy to learn new things and improve or revise my knowledge. So, if you could point me to some relevant documents, I'd appreciate it greatly.

I'm not a big fan of GC actually. Rather don't create garbage in the first place. That's why you have concepts like ARC in modern Objective-C implementations. This frees the programmer from most of the memory management (like GC) but without the runtime performance impact. I don't see how Java compares better to Obj-C here to be honest, not anymore at least. When Apple started to port OPENSTEP to the Mac, they actually even tried to implement Cocoa in Java or at least provide a Java-Objective-C bridge. Don't remember exactly how long they kept trying, but I guess they had good reasons to give up on it. It worked kinda ok with WebObject, but that's about it IIRC.

Well clone wasn't well formulated. It drew heavy inspiration from OPENSTEP and Objective-C, which at that time was used by Sun as well (OpenStep for Solaris) but then ditched in favour of Java. Let's put it that way. :)