Objective-C is just, like, a leaky abstraction over C

Recently I came across this 10 year old post by Robert Atkins: Objective C is like Jimi Hendrix. It is about reconciling admiration for Objective-C by the "old-timers" with the newcomers' somewhat less enthusiastic response. His very cogent insight was that Objective-C, like Jimi Hendrix, introduced new concepts that were somewhat revolutionary (""mind blowing") at the time, but are now taken for granted: So if you'e new to Objective-C and, as I am, struggling to come to terms with the fact that it's one great big leaky abstraction on top of C, put yourself in the shoes of an 80s C programmer and remember you get to use these neat "modern" features in a systems programming language. As one of the very early, pre-NeXT, adopters of Objective-C, I have a slightly different take: That implicit "despite" is actually very much a "because" for me. The modern features in Objective-C such as a dynamic messaging, a runtime with introspection and intercession etc. were not new at the time, and…