>It’s truly remarkable they made something with such staying power

What has had the staying power is the API because that API is for an operating system that has had that staying power. As you hint, the macOS of today is simply the evolution of NeXTSTEP (released in 1989). And iOS is just a light version of it.

But 1989 is not all that remarkable. The Linux API (POSIX) was introduced in 1988 but started in 1984 and based on an API that emerged in the 70s. And the Windows API goes back to 1985. Apple is the newest API of the three.

As far as languages go, the Ladybird team is abandoning Swift to stick with C++ which was released back in 1979. And of course C++ is just an evolution of C which goes back to 1972 and which almost all of Linux is still written in.

And what is Ladybird even? It is an HTML interpretter. HTML was introduced in 1993. Guess what operating system HTML and the first web browser was created on. That is right...NeXTSTEP.

In some ways ObjC’s and the NEXTSTEP API’s staying power is more impressive because they survived the failure of their relatively small patron organization. POSIX and C++ were developed at and supported by tech titans - the 1970s and 1980s equivalents of FAANG. Meanwhile back at the turn of the century we had all witnessed the demise of NeXT and many of us were anticipating the demise of Apple, and there was no particularly strong reason to believe that a union of the two would fare any better, let alone grow to become one of the A’s in FAANG.

I actually suspect that ObjC and the NeXT APIs played a big part in that success. I know they’ve fallen out of favor now, and for reasons I have to assume are good. But back in the early 2000s, the difference in how quickly I could develop a good GUI for OS X compared to what I was used to on Windows and GNOME was life changing. It attracted a bunch of developers to the platform, not just me, which spurred an accumulation of applications with noticeably better UX that, in turn, helped fuel Apple’s consumer sentiment revival.