I think there's a good answer to that: to a first approximation, no one bought NeXT machines; therefore, there was no demand for NeXT apps and therefore no one produced any.

But it's unlikely that Steve Jobs of all people would want to provide that explanation.

Around 2001 my company sent me to a training class for Objective-C and as far as I can remember, it's like a small tweak of C++ with primitive smart pointers, so I doubt that it's 10x more productive than any other language. Maybe 1.01x more productive.

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kragen a day ago | parent [-]

That is not correct. Objective-C has a completely different OO system from C++. All they have in common is that they're both extended subsets of C. Retain/release are also not smart pointers; Objective-C doesn't have the C++ features needed to implement smart pointers.

Objective-C++ is a different matter, but it was written many years after the time we are discussing.

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chihuahua a day ago | parent [-]

I apologize that my memory has faded over the intervening 25 years.

What I do remember is that it's an odd language, but nothing about it suggested that it would even be 2x more productive than C or C++ or Java.

I didn't get to use it much after the week-long class; the only reason the company sent 3 of us across the country for a week is because the CTO had a bizarre obsession with Objective-C and OS X.

	▲	kragen a day ago \| parent [-]
		I think it's universally agreed at this point that OO didn't provide the order of magnitude improvement in software development velocity that Jobs was touting. I do think ObjC is more flexible than C or C++.