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Objective-C, often referred to as ObjC or more seldom as Objective C or Obj-C, is a reflective, object oriented programming language which adds Smalltalk-style messaging to C. more...

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Today it is used primarily on Mac OS X and GNUstep, two environments based on the OpenStep standard, and is the primary language used for the NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, and Cocoa application frameworks. Generic Objective-C programs that do not make use of these libraries can also be compiled for any system supported by gcc, which includes an Objective-C compiler.

History

In the early 1980s, common software engineering practice was based on structured programming. Structured programming was implemented in order to help "break down" programs into smaller parts, primarily to make them easier to work on as they grew increasingly large. However, as the problems being solved grew in size, structured programming became less useful as more and more procedures had to be written, leading to spaghetti code and poor code reuse.

Many saw object-oriented programming as a potential solution to the problem. In fact, Smalltalk had already addressed many of these engineering issues: some of the most complex systems in the world were Smalltalk environments. On the downside, Smalltalk used a virtual machine. This virtual machine was very large and tended to require huge amounts of memory for the time and ran very slowly.

ObjC was created primarily by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s at their company Stepstone. Brad had become interested in the problems of true reusability in software design and programming. In order to demonstrate that real progress could be made, Cox set about to show that making interchangeable software components really needed only a few practical changes to existing tools. Specifically, they needed to support objects in a flexible manner, come supplied with a set of libraries that were usable, and allow for the code (and any resources needed by the code) to be bundled into a single cross-platform format.

The main description of Objective-C in its original form was published in his book, Object-Oriented Programming, An Evolutionary Approach in 1986. Cox was careful to point out that there is more to the problem of reusability than just the language, though despite this, the system often found itself compared on a feature-for-feature basis with other languages.

Popularization through NeXT

In 1988, Steve Jobs' NeXT licensed Objective-C from StepStone (the owner of the Objective-C trademark) and released their own Objective-C compiler and libraries on which the NeXTstep user interface and interface builder were based. The success of the tools and quality of the resultant operating system helped NeXT become a fairly popular niche workstation provider.

Read more at Wikipedia.org