The roots of Objective-C began at ITT in the early 1980s in a research group led by Tom Love investigating improving programmer productivity by an order of magnitude, a concern motivated by the perceived "software crisis" articulated in the late 1960s. In 1981, Brad Cox, a member of this group, began to investigate Smalltalk and object-oriented programming for this purpose, but needed a language compatible with the Unix and C environments used by ITT. That year, Cox quickly wrote up the Object-Oriented Pre-Compiler (OOPC) that would translate a Smalltalk-like syntax into C. Love felt there was a market for object-oriented solutions that could coexist with legacy languages and platforms, and after a brief stint at Schlumberger-Doll, co-founded with Cox Productivity Products International (PPI), later renamed as Stepstone, to pursue this. At PPI, Cox developed OOPC into Objective-C. Cox saw Objective-C as a crucial link in his larger vision of creating a market for "pre-fabricated" software components ("software-ICs"), which could be bought off the shelf and which, Cox believed, would unleash a "software industrial revolution." Steve Naroff joined Stepstone in 1986 as Steve Jobs' NeXT Computer became an important customer for Objective-C, as it was being used in its NeXTSTEP operating system. Naroff became the primary Stepstone developer addressing NeXT's issues with Objective-C, solving a key fragility problem preventing NeXT from deploying forwards-compatible object libraries. Impressed with NeXT, Naroff left Stepstone for NeXT in 1988, and once there, added Objective-C support to Richard Stallman's GNU GCC compiler, which NeXT was using as its C compiler, removing the need to use Stepstone's ObjC to C translator. Over the next several years, Naroff and others would add significant new features to Objective-C, such as "categories," "protocols," and the ability to mix in C++ code. When Stepstone folded in 1994, all rights to Objective-C were acquired by NeXT. This eventually transferred to Apple when NeXT was acquired by Apple in 1997. Objective-C became the basis for Apple's Mac OS X and then iOS platforms, and Naroff and others at Apple added additional features to the language in the late 2000s as the iPhone App Store greatly expanded Objective-C's user base.

article Free Access Share on The economics of software reuse Authors: Martin Griss Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Hewlett-Packard LaboratoriesView Profile , Sam S. Adams Knowledge Systems Corporation Knowledge Systems CorporationView Profile , Howard Baetjer Agorics Project, George Mason University Agorics Project, George Mason UniversityView Profile , Brad J. Cox Information Age Consulting Information Age ConsultingView Profile , Adele Goldberg ParcPlace Systems ParcPlace SystemsView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGPLAN NoticesVolume 26Issue 11Nov. 1991 pp 264–270https://doi.org/10.1145/118014.117974Online:01 November 1991Publication History 4citation651DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations4Total Downloads651Last 12 Months26Last 6 weeks7 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

It is argued that software is actually a hybrid at the intersection of two fundamentally different domains: the purely concrete plane of everyday physical, tangible experience and the purely abstract plane of intangible thought. The concrete plane is governed by well-understood laws of physics, and the abstract domain by its own laws of mathematics and logic. However, since software is a hybrid, the intersection of these two radically different domains, it does not fully abide by either set of laws. A high-level plan for winning the software industrial revolution is proposed. It is argued that it is necessary to deploy explicit specification tools, and new and largely unexplored kinds of tools. Their function is to gauge compliance between a given implementation of some part and the abstract specification of that part.>

Source to source translation tools provide a way of integrating the strengths of production programming environments like C/UNIX™ with rapid prototyping environments like Smalltalk-80™ into a comprehensive hybrid environment that spans more of the software development life-spiral than ever before. This paper describes a tool-assisted process for translating Smalltalk-80 programs into Objective-C™, and shows how the tool, called Producer, is used in practice. To assist others in using this translation tool, we have made Producer publicly available without charge on USENET.