The History of Objective-C

Before learning the intricacies of a new programming language it is often worth taking a little time to learn about the history and legacy of that language. In this chapter of Objective-C 2.0 Essentials we will provide a brief overview of the origins of Objective-C and the history that ultimately let to it becoming the programming language of choice for both Mac OS X and the iPhone.

The C Programming Language

Objective-C is based on a programing language called, quite simply, C. The origins of the C programming language can be traced back nearly 40 years to two engineers named Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson working at what is now known as AT&T Bell Labs. At the time, the two were working on developing the UNIX operating system on PDP-7 and PDP-11 systems. After attempts to write this operating system using assembly language (essentially using sequences instruction codes understood by the processor), it was decided that a higher level, more programmer friendly programming language was required. The first attempt was a language called B. The B language, which was based on a language called BCPL was found to be lacking. Taking the next initial from the BCPL name, the C language was created and subsequently used to write much of the UNIX operating system kernel and infrastructure. As far as we can tell, C was so successful that new languages named P and L never needed to be created.