A few weeks ago, I posted my lengthy thoughts about Objective C, what’s wrong with it, and what I think will happen in the future with it:

Apple is a product-driven company, not a computing-driven company. While there are certainly many employees interested in the future of computing, Apple isn’t the company to drive [replacing it]. It’s hard to convince such a highly successful product company to operate otherwise. So if a successor language is to emerge, it’s got to come from elsewhere. […] I’m not convinced a better Objective C, some kind of Objective Next is the right way to go. A new old thing is not really what we need. It seems absurd that 30 years after the Mac we still build the same applications the same ways. It seems absurd we still haven’t really caught up to Smalltalk. It seems absurd beautiful graphical applications are created solely and sorely in textual, coded languages. And it seems absurd to rely on one vendor to do something about it.

There has been lots of talk in the weeks since I posted my article criticizing Objective C, including a post by my friend Ash Furrow, Steve Streza, Guy English, and Brent Simmons. Much of their criticisms are similar or ring true to mine, but the suggestions for fixing the ills of Objective C almost all miss the point:

We don’t need a better Objective C; we need a better way to make software. We do that in two steps: figure out what we’re trying to accomplish, and then figure out how to accomplish it. It’s simple, but nearly every post about replacing Objective C completely ignores these two steps.

I work on programming languages professionally at Hopscotch, which I mention not so I can brag about it but so I can explain this is a subject I care deeply about, something I work on every day. This isn’t just a cursory glance because I’ve had some grumbles with the language. This essay is my way of critically examining and exploring possibilities for future development environments we can all benefit from. That requires stepping a bit beyond what most Objective C developers seem willing to consider, but it’s important nonetheless.

Figure out what we’re trying to make

We think we know what we want from an Objective C replacement. We want Garbage Collection, we want better concurrency, we don’t want pointers. We want better networking, better data base, better syncing functionality. We want a better, real runtime. We don’t want header files or import statements.

These are all really very nice and good, but they’re actually putting the CPU before the horse. If you ask most developers why they want any of those things, they’ll likely tell you it’s because those are the rough spots of Objective C as it exists today. But they’ll say nothing of what they’re actually trying to accomplish with the language (hat tip to Guy English though for being the exception here).

This kind of thinking is what Alan Kay refers to as “Instrumental thinking”, where you only think of new inventions in terms of how they can allow you to do your same precise job in a better way. Personal computing software has fallen victim to instrumental thinking routinely since its inception. A word processor’s sole function is to help you layout your page better, but it does nothing to help your writing (orthography is a technicality).

Such is the same with the thinking that goes around with replacing Objective C. Almost all the wishlists for replacements simply ask for wrinkles to be ironed out.

If you’re wondering what such a sandpapered Objective Next might look like, I’ll point you to one I drew up in early 2013 (while I too was stuck in the instrumental thinking trap, I’ll admit).

It’s easy to get excited about the (non-existing) language if you’re an Objective C programmer, but I’m imploring the Objective C community to try and think beyond a “new old-thing”, try to actually think of something that solves the bigger pictures.

When thinking about what could really replace Objective C, then, it’s crucial to clear your mind of the minutia and dirt involved in how you program today, and try to think exclusively of what you’re trying to accomplish.

For most Objective C developers, we’re trying to make high quality software, that looks and feels great to use. We’re looking to have a tremendous amount of delight and polish to our products. And hopefully, most importantly, we’re trying to build software to significantly improve the lives of people.

That’s what we want to do. That’s what we want to do better. The problem isn’t about whether or not our programming language has garbage collection, the problem is whether or not we can build higher quality software in a new environment than we could with Objective C’s code-wait-run cycle.

In the Objective C community, “high quality software” usually translates to visually beautiful and fantastically useable interfaces. We care a tremendous amount about how our applications are presented and understood by our users, and this kind of quality takes a mountain of effort to accomplish. Our software is usually developed by a team of programmers and a team of designers, working in syncopation to deliver on the high quality standards we’ve set for ourselves. More often than not, the programers become the bottleneck, if only because every other part of the development team must ultimately have their work funnelled through code at some point. This causes long feedback loops in development time, and if it’s frustrating to make and compare improvements to the design, it is often forgone altogether.

This strain trickles down to the rest of the development process. If it’s difficult to experiment, then it’s difficult to imagine new possibilities for what your software could do. This, in part, reinforces our instrumental thinking, because it’s usually just too painful to try and think outside the box. We’d never be able to validate our outside box thinking even if we wanted to! And thus, this too strains our ability to build software that significantly enhances the lives of our customers and users.

With whatever Objective C replacement there may be, whether we demand it or we build it ourselves, isn’t it best to think not how to improve Objective C but instead how make the interaction between programmer and designer more cohesive? Or how to shift some of the power (and responsibility) of the computer out of the hands of the programmer and into the arms of the designer?

Something as simple as changing the colour or size of text should not be the job of the programmer, not because the programmer is lazy (which is mostly certainly probably true anyway) but because these are issues of graphic design, of presentation, which the designer is surely better trained and more equipped to handle. Yet this sort of operation is almost agonizing from a development perspective. It’s not that making these changes are hard, but that it often requires the programmer to switch tasks, when and only when there is time, and then present changes to the designer for approval. This is one loose feedback loop and there’s no real good reason why it has to be this way. It might work out pretty well the other way.

Can you think of any companies where design is paramount?

When you’re thinking of a replacement for Objective C, remember to think of why you want it in the first place. Think about how we can make software in better ways. Think about how your designers can improve your software if they had more access to it, or how you could improve things if you could only see them.

This is not just about a more graphical environment, and it’s not just about designers playing a bigger role. It’s about trying to seek out what makes software great, and how our development tools could enable software to be better.

How do we do it?

If we’re going to build a replacement programming environment for Objective C, what’s it going to be made of? Most compiled languages can be built with LLVM quite handily these days—

STOP

We’ve absolutely got to stop and check more of our assumptions first. Why do we assume we need a compiled language? Why not an interpreted language? Objective C developers are pretty used to this concept, and most developers will assert compiled languages are faster than interpreted or virtual machine language (“just look at how slow Android is, this is because it runs Java and Java runs in a VM,” we say). It’s true that compiled apps are almost always going to be faster than interpreted apps, but the difference isn’t substantial enough to close the door on them so firmly, so quickly. Remember, today’s iPhones are just-as-fast-if-not-faster than a pro desktop computer ten years ago, and those ran interpreted apps just fine. While you may be able to point at stats and show me that compiled apps are faster, in practice the differences are often negligible, especially with smart programmers doing the implementation. So lets keep the door open on interpreted languages.

Whether compiled or interpreted, if you’re going to make a programming language then you definitely need to define a grammar, work on a parser, and—

STOP

Again, we’ve got to stop and check another assumption. Why make the assumption that our programming environment of the future must be textual? Lines of pure code, stored in pure text files, compiled or interpreted, it makes little difference. Is that the future we wish to inherit?

We presume code whenever we think programming, probably because it’s all most of us are ever exposed to. We don’t even consider the possibility that we could create programs without typing in code. But with all the abundance and diversity of software, both graphical and not, should it really seem so strange that software itself might be created in a medium other than code?

“Ah, but we’ve tried that and it sucked,” you’ll say. For every sucky coded programming language, there’s probably a sucky graphical programming language too. “We’ve tried UML and we’ve tried Smalltalk,” you’ll say, and I’ll say “Yes we did, 40 years of research and a hundred orders of magnitude ago, we tried, and the programming community at large decided it was a capital Bad Idea.” But as much as times change, computers change more. We live in an era of unprecedented computing power, with rich (for a computer) displays, ubiquitous high speed networking, and decades of research.

For some recent examples of graphical programming environments that actually work, see Bret Victor’s Stop Drawing Dead Fish and Drawing Dynamic Visualizations talks, or Toby Schachman’s (of Recursive Drawing fame) excellent talk on opening up programming to new demographics by going visual. I’m not saying any one of these tools, as is, are a replacement for Objective C, but I am saying these tools demonstrate what’s possible when we open our eyes, if only the tiniest smidge, and try to see what software development might look like beyond coded programming languages.

And of course, just because we should seriously consider non-code-centric languages doesn’t mean that everything must be graphical either. There are of course concepts we can represent linguistically which we can’t map or model graphically, so to completely eschew a linguistic interface to program creation would be just as absurd as completely eschewing a graphical interface to program creation in a coded language.

The benefits for even the linguistic parts of a graphical programming environment are plentiful. Consider the rich typographic language we forego when we code in plain text files. We lose the benefits of type choices, of font sizes and weight, hierarchical groupings. Even without any pictures, think how much more typographically rich a newspaper is compared to a plain text program file. In code, we’re relegated to fixed-width, same size and weight fonts. We’re lucky if we get any semblance of context from syntax highlighting, and it’s often a battle to impel programmers to use whitespace to create ersatz typographic hierarchies in code. Without strong typography, nothing looks any more important than anything else as you gawk at a source code file. Experienced code programmers can see what’s important, but they’re not seeing it with their eyes. Why should we, the advanced users of advanced computers, be working in a medium that’s less visually rich than even the first movable type printed books, five centuries old?

And that’s to say nothing of other graphical elements. Would you like to see some of my favourite colours? Here are three: #fed82f , #37deff , #fc222f . Aren’t they lovely? The computer knows how to render those colours better than we know how to read hex, so why doesn’t it do that? Why don’t we demand this of our programming environment?

Objective: Next

If we’re ever going to get a programming environment of the future, we should make sure we get one that’s right for us and our users. We should make sure we’re looking far down the road, not at our shoes. We shouldn’t try to build a faster horse, but we should instead look where we’re really trying to go and then find the best way to get there.

We also shouldn’t rely on one company to get us there. There’s still plenty to be discovered by plenty of people. If you’d like to help me discover it, I’d love to hear from you.