There were a lot of people actively complaining about ObjC in the lead-up to the unveiling of Swift. In fact I recall one prominent blogger in the iOS community begging Apple just a few months earlier to consider replacing it.
Unfortunately although Swift seemed promising at first, by the time Swift 3 rolled around a lot of people were actively frustrated and moved on from iOS development. Having actual experienced hands guiding that ship could have led to something great instead of the mess that is there today.
Most of the complaints about ObjC seemed to be from the “weird bracket syntax” folks, at least the loud ones.
Memory management, Generics, Fast enumeration, Properties were seamlessly added to ObjC over the years without adding to the cognitive load of the language, which is minimally more than that of C. It’s a small superset of C and (for me) hits that complexity/expressiveness sweet spot. YMMV, of course.
It would be interesting if instead of a new language the Objective-C compiler enforced a a memory safe version of C. That’s the biggest advantage of Swift, imho.
I hated the properties addition in Objective-C. Why add that and not a dot syntax for all messages? Having a dot operator in a pointer blurred too much of the line between C and Obj-C syntax for my taste.
Are you talking about the unveiling of Swift or SwiftUI? My recollection was that some people hated ObjC and wanted a more modern language. Apple gave them Swift. But I don’t recall people hating AppKit (maybe I wasn’t remembering correctly) and SwiftUI was basically Apple following the hipster trend.
Unfortunately although Swift seemed promising at first, by the time Swift 3 rolled around a lot of people were actively frustrated and moved on from iOS development. Having actual experienced hands guiding that ship could have led to something great instead of the mess that is there today.