from Hacker News

Brad Cox has died

by carlosrg on 1/22/21, 9:54 PM with 190 comments

  • by bartmika on 1/22/21, 10:51 PM

    > On one scuba diving excursion while in the compound having lunch, Brad engaged a couple from Germany in conversation. Brad asked about the fellow travelers occupation and discovered he was a computer programmer. Lifewise, Brad was asked about his life's work and stated I am also a computer programmer. "What do you do?" Brad was asked. I wrote Objective-C. Astonished, the gentlerman said, "No, Brad Cox wrote that". "Hi, I am Brad Cox", was the response and the introduction.

    Wonderful story. I wish his family all the best.

    I love Objective-C and consider it a beautiful language. Back in the day I re-discovered my love for programming when I started to learn this language. This was when I was still in the Java world.

    As a side project I tried to build a drone (unmanned navel vehicle) powered by objective-c. I have abandoned the effort but posted the code on GitHub - it was a joy to work with the language and the funnest side project I’ve worked with.

    These days I work with python and golang for job/hobby but I always am grateful to have spent time with objective-c. Reflecting back if I haven’t spent time with this language, today I would of not been a programmer.

    Thank you Brad Cox for your work and positive influence.

  • by AJRF on 1/22/21, 11:15 PM

    I am giving a talk in work soon around method swizzling in iOS and was delving into the history of Objective-C a bit and came across Alan Kay's talk about the power of simplicity and how we've all screwed up OOP.

    In the talk, Alan talks about the ant who lives his life on a single plane of existence, the "Gulley World" or "Reality".

    The ant goes to work, he finds stuff to eat, he lives his life in this Gulley World, which is depicted as a pink 2D plane. However some times on this pink plane there are little spots of blue. They represent thoughts that don't belong in the pink plane.

    Sometimes those blue spots turn into blue planes, and the ant we are following starts to move along that plane instead of the pink one. Everyone in the pink plane thinks he is wrong. Everyone can see the pink plane, in all its reality. It is not until you walk on the blue plane until you can see "another way".

    The metaphor being that we developers built a world where we started to take the general idea of OOP and construct a lot of "reality" around it. A lot of process, a lot of formalization so we could build mechanical systems of gears that slotted together. I think Alan's idea of OOP was something more fluid, more organic than this. The world is messy and we often try to abstract the mess away in these overbearingly weighty and hierarchical programs that everyone agrees is the right way.

    I think Objective-C was the most widely used and successful walk on this blue plane. Millions of developers were exposed to the idea of message passing as a form of OOP, which is an astounding accomplishment. It really is a neat language, and I had a lot of fun learning it.

    Brad definitely walked on the blue plane. RIP.

  • by microtherion on 1/23/21, 12:13 AM

    I met him once in the late 1990s, when his travels took him to Zurich and he asked me whether I could book a talk for him at ETH Zurich, where I was a grad student.

    I did not quite share his confidence in my abilities in that area, but to my relief, Jürg Gutknecht agreed to sponsor the talk, and I got to spend lunch with Brad Cox, Niklaus Wirth, and Jürg Gutknecht. Given their highly divergent aesthetics in language syntax, I expected some fireworks, but the conversation was quite pleasant, even when they were discussing Perl.

    I was at the time the maintainer of the Mac port of Perl, and had taken some classes with Wirth, but the idea of discussing Perl with him struck me as akin to discussing masturbation with the Pope. However, Wirth conceded that in the area of text processing, general purpose languages tended to be somewhat clumsy, and there had always been a successful niche for languages like Snobol and now Perl.

    Brad Cox was a splendid conversationalist in many other areas as well. His talk focused on Superdistribution as the next evolution of the Software IC concept, and he very skillfully pitched this to a Swiss audience that a banking nation should be a natural superpower to take the lead in a micropayment world. He was very good at painting visions like this, but I'm not sure how much of it ultimately came to pass:

    a) I don't think we're any closer to plug and play "Software ICs" than we were in the mid-1980s when he introduced the term. In the Objective C ecosystem, the closest there was to that was maybe Interface Builder with its Outlets and Actions, but I think that part did NOT originate with Cox (I may be mistaken, though).

    b) Likewise, I don't see any move to distributed micropayments. If anything, more and more of the software revenue seems to come from centrally billed cloud services, e.g. comparing the Microsoft Office revenue model 20 years ago and now.

  • by dwheeler on 1/22/21, 10:38 PM

    Very sad. I had the privilege of taking a class from him at George Mason University, and he was (unsurprisingly) very knowledgeable.

    He worked hard to enable software reuse. No one was interested in his idea of trying to monitor component use during runtime to pay developers. That was an unworkable approach, and I told him that then. But the general world of making it easy to reuse components is a reality today, via open source software and package managers.

    So, a hat-tip to him and all the other pioneers who helped make the world a better place.

  • by mucholove on 1/23/21, 3:38 AM

    Two years ago I started writing an app in Swift. After a two year sabbatical, this was going to be my first app.

    When using Swift, the compiler was painstakingly slow. Because of that, I tried Objective-C and it is so clear to me that I love it. It is the best language in my humble opinion. The dynamism clicked and the modern features make it a real breeze to use.

    Messages are so flexible. I also love how it has “gradual typing.”

    My only gripe with it is that Categories can’t formally conform to protocols—which I understand is an easy to build feature that Blaine Garst did finish but Apple never released.

    I know I’m talking about the language more than I am talking about Brad Cox, but that’s because it’s the first time I really fell in love with a language. Using Objective-C to build it brings me joy. Lots and lots of joy.

    Thank you Brad. My prayers to your family. May you find peace in heaven.

  • by kdavis on 1/22/21, 10:53 PM

    Many moons ago I used to work with Brad in DC. He never let on that he was a world famous computer scientist. He slinged code shoulder to shoulder with us plebes.

    He was a Mensch.

  • by gigantor on 1/22/21, 11:15 PM

    There is no doubting the legacy of Objective-C (especially given the high likelihood you are reading this post on a mobile device, using app written in Objective-C), but to truly appreciate Brad's legacy, am curious about the appeal of using Objective-C.

    Having developed only one small iOS app with Objective-C code, I was mostly turned off by its overall verbosity in the context of NS prefixes. Hence, I ask the question on behalf myself and others who did not appreciate the language and did not give it a proper chance... what did I miss and what are its top appeals?

    Nevertheless, Rest In Peace to a pioneer.

  • by gdubs on 1/22/21, 11:11 PM

    [BradCox release]

    RIP.

    I owe so much to Objective-C. My early love for the language is what launched my own career, and inspired a love for programming in general. Thank you, Brad Cox.

  • by arthurofbabylon on 1/23/21, 3:43 AM

    It’s odd to feel sad having never known this man, and only written in the language he helped create. Perhaps it is a testament to the beauty of Objective-C that I feel moved.

    Objective-C is poetic. Its patterns and clarity are the closest I’ve come to an ecological software language: I feel like I’m gardening when writing Objective-C code.

  • by srcreigh on 1/23/21, 2:56 AM

    My first programming job used Objective C to make an iOS app. Back in 2013 XCode was pretty fast. My naive youthful self enjoyed using Objective C's Categories and Associated Objects to share some UI code across 2 UIViewControllers.

    Did I get it to work? yep. Did it make senior programmers a bit nervous? yep. I wrote a blog post about it.

    Later, I got to use Java for some Android apps, and after that we got Swift. XCode seemed to get slower with swift and Java(android) was more a limited language. No complaints, but it was just not as fun and easy as using Objective C. (in my naive beginner opinion)

    Things were a lot simpler back then. I'll never forget my joy learning Objective C at my first ever programming job. RIP Brad Cox

  • by robbyking on 1/22/21, 10:36 PM

    I love the quote from him where he says "languages are mere tools for building and combining parts of software." I think a lot of new developers get hung up on Language A vs. Language B (or OS A vs. OS B), so I hope this helps them realize that the languages are just tools you have in your toolbox, and that they should be open to switching between (and learning new) languages as needed.

  • by saagarjha on 1/22/21, 11:12 PM

    :(

    Objective-C was the “object oriented C” that was simple and a delight to use…words that I certainly would not use to describe competing efforts. The syntax might be a little disagreeable–a concession to strict C compatibility–but the language itself is remarkably clean and, dare I say, pretty. Brad Cox struck the balance between flexibility and practicality better than almost anyone else before or since.

  • by Austin_Conlon on 1/22/21, 10:25 PM

    Computer History Museum interview with him: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201....

  • by dang on 1/22/21, 11:09 PM

  • by armadsen on 1/22/21, 10:49 PM

    Objective-C is the programming language that made me fall in love with programming, and led to my career for the past 14 years.

    I never met Brad Cox, but the work he did to create it has had a huge impact on my life. Watching his long interview with the computer history museum was a delight and made me feel like I knew him just a little.

    Sincere condolences to his family and friends.

  • by raymondh on 1/23/21, 12:58 AM

    Sorry to hear that he has passed. His book, "Object-Oriented Programming : An Evolutionary Approach" still influences how I think about and teach OOP today. His legacy will live for a long time.

  • by throw03172019 on 1/22/21, 10:17 PM

    RIP. Objective-C was my first language and I enjoyed it even with manual memory management!

  • by jhbadger on 1/22/21, 10:15 PM

    I always liked his analogy for object oriented programming as "software ICs" -- just as in hardware development, you don't have to worry about what goes on in a chip (just what it takes as input and gives as output), so too a well designed object works.

  • by WoodenChair on 1/22/21, 10:35 PM

    There's an extended interview with him about Objective-C in the book "Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages": https://amzn.to/3iEYfGh

  • by nhojb on 1/23/21, 12:57 PM

    I've spent pretty much my entire career (20 years!) writing Objective-C: first for macOS, later iOS. Of course Swift is now the new kid on the block, and has lots to recommend it. But there's something about the simplicity and purity of Objective-C that has a special place in my developer's heart (despite its flaws & imperfections).

    So thank you Brad, you've influenced my entire career. RIP.

  • by cxr on 1/22/21, 10:53 PM

    I mentioned Brad Cox's "software ICs" today on the phone in a conversation about big ideas in programming, not knowing that he'd passed away a couple weeks ago.

    Here's the Objective-C paper at last year's HOPL:

    "The origins of Objective-C at PPI/Stepstone and its evolution at NeXT"

    https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386332

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23516334

  • by arthurcolle on 1/22/21, 11:17 PM

    This is Apple Objective-C right? I thought it was developed in house, didn't realize it had already existed.

  • by fao_ on 1/23/21, 12:05 AM

    You won't find much on his Wikipedia article, but his C2 wiki page has more: http://wiki.c2.com/?BradCox

  • by spacedcowboy on 1/23/21, 2:26 AM

      - (void) dealloc
      {
      // :(
      }

  • by msie on 1/22/21, 10:34 PM

    [me say:"Oh no! This sucks."];

    I loved his little book on Objective-C.

  • by bogomipz on 1/22/21, 11:20 PM

    What an amazing career. I was curious about this:

    >"The late Steve Jobs', NeXT, licensed the Objective-C language for it's new operating system, NEXTSTEP. NeXT eventually acquired Objective-C from Stepstone."

    Does anyone what NeXT paid to acquire the Objective-C license?

  • by dilap on 1/22/21, 10:52 PM

    Great language. Amazing bang for the buck. RIP.

  • by tinus_hn on 1/23/21, 11:55 AM

    What a legacy. Objective-C feels like a fun toy you can play with, it really does make cool things quite easy that are really hard in most other languages, like the iOS animation system.

  • by erik_seaberg on 1/22/21, 10:35 PM

    He was bold enough to create a DSL starting from C. Too many black bar-worthy losses lately.

  • by tartoran on 1/23/21, 2:25 AM

  • by brightball on 1/23/21, 5:28 PM

    I had no idea he was living in South Carolina until I saw the news begin to appear on local channels.

  • by smaili on 1/22/21, 10:45 PM

    Very sad, rest in peace and thank you for all your contributions.

  • by frr149 on 1/23/21, 3:15 PM

    Was it covid?

  • by adamnemecek on 1/23/21, 10:17 AM

    The message passer has passed.

  • by WarOnPrivacy on 1/22/21, 11:34 PM

    Having lived in Manassas, I express my deep regret that this pioneer spent his final years there.

  • by ahmetyas01 on 1/23/21, 12:53 AM

    Allah rahmet eylesin

  • by sigzero on 1/22/21, 10:27 PM

    Wow, so very sad.

  • by btilly on 1/22/21, 10:43 PM

    Does anyone know what he died of?

    Given current events, my assumption is COVID-19. But I know that I'm assuming that too often. Old people do die of other things.

  • by btzo on 1/23/21, 12:28 AM

    funny thing, I just discovered the singer Brad Cox [0] searching for the original Brad Cox Wikipedia page and I like his songs

    [0]: https://www.youtube.com/user/bradleycoxmusic