Linked List: January 22, 2021

Friday, 22 January 2021

Brad Cox, Creator of Objective-C, Dies at 77 

From an obituary published January 8:

The late Steve Jobs’ NeXT licensed the Objective-C language for its new operating system, NeXTStep. NeXT eventually acquired Objective-C from Stepstone. Objective-C continued to be the primary programming language for writing software for Apple’s OS X and iOS.

What a lovely story:

He and his wife, Etta, enjoyed traveling for leisure, as well, and visited the Caribbean often as they both enjoyed scuba diving. Belize especially held fond memories for them. On one scuba diving excursion while in the compound having lunch, Brad engaged a couple from Germany in conversation. Brad asked about the fellow traveler’s occupation and discovered he was a computer programmer. Likewise, 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 gentleman said, “No, Brad Cox wrote that.” “Hi, I am Brad Cox”, was the response and the introduction. Needless to say, much conversation ensued after the scuba diving concluded.

It’s simply impossible to overstate how influential Cox and his masterpiece, Objective-C were. I wouldn’t begin to claim to be an expert on Objective-C, but I know enough to see how it was more than a language. It was a language — a thin layer of syntax on top of C — but also embodied the idea of a dynamic runtime. The result was a language that ran fast like C but enabled programmer expressiveness and introspection like Smalltalk. Running fast like C is always a good thing, but it was essential on the slow desktop hardware of the ’80s and ’90s — and then, once again, on the slow mobile hardware of the early iPhone era. Smalltalk-inspired expressiveness is what makes Objective-C great for writing nontrivial applications. No other language of the era achieved such a balance.

Great programming languages are great for writing certain types of software. Objective-C is great for writing apps and app frameworks. Turns out that made for a great language — and an enormous competitive advantage for the one company that banked its entire software stack on it.

Nicely Illustrated NYT Report on the Collapse of the U.S. Postal Service in December 

Anecdotally, I can say that my experience jibes with eastern Pennsylvania’s black coloring on these maps. All of our mail has been astoundingly late since mid-December, even by the standards of 2020 postal delivery problems. Christmas cards from family 50 miles away arrived 3-4 weeks after being put in the mail.

Fixing this should be a priority for the Biden administration: get the Postal Service back to its normal dependable service while the memory of what it was like under Trump remains fresh in everyone’s minds. This is absolutely something that everyday Americans notice and care about.

Amanda Gorman’s Closing of the ‘Some Good News’ Graduation Special 

Early in the pandemic, John Krasinski made a show on YouTube called Some Good News. It quickly became a sensation, and he sold it to Viacom, so that the show might continue while he continued his acting and filmmaking.

In May, as the original run wrapped up, the show finished with a graduation special. Featured, briefly at the 13:00 mark and more significantly in the closing minute: none other than Amanda Gorman, the 22-year-old poet laureate who became a star at this week’s inauguration.

The Complete List of Trump’s Twitter Insults (2015-2021) 

The New York Times:

As a political figure, Donald J. Trump used Twitter to praise, to cajole, to entertain, to lobby, to establish his version of events — and, perhaps most notably, to amplify his scorn. This list documents the verbal attacks Mr. Trump posted on Twitter, from when he declared his candidacy in June 2015 to Jan. 8, when Twitter permanently barred him.

What a great piece of programming and indexing. How great, too, that it can be said to be complete.

Vin Scully Calls Hank Aaron’s Historic 715th Home Run 

“What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol.”

Hank Aaron Dies at 86 

Terence Moore, writing for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

In March of 1954, with his place in the major leagues far from assured, Hank Aaron was granted a start in a Milwaukee exhibition game versus Boston, only because Bobby Thomson, the regular left fielder and Aaron’s idol, had just broken his ankle.

Already possessed of dramatic timing at the age of 20, the rookie promptly drilled a ball that carried the wall, flew over a row of trailers parked outside the Sarasota park and reverberated so loudly in the Red Sox clubhouse that the great Ted Williams emerged, as Aaron recalled, “wanting to know who it was that could make a bat sound that way when it hit a baseball.”

Everyone remembers Aaron for the home runs, but my god, look at his career numbers. 23 seasons, .305 batting average, 3,771 total hits. He not only finished as the all-time home run leader, but he also finished his career second on the all-time hits list, behind Ty Cobb. (Pete Rose eventually passed him on the hits list, and Barry Bonds on the home runs list. But Bonds finished 37th on the all-time hits list, and Pete Rose hit only 160 career home runs.) And Aaron did all this playing the bulk of his career, and his prime years, in an era so dominated by pitching that MLB lowered the height of the pitching mound in 1968. Aaron still holds the MLB record for RBIs (2,297), total bases (6,856) and extra-base hits (1,477), and he ranks fourth for runs scored (2,174 — exactly tied with a guy named Babe Ruth, what are the odds?).

“Who it was that could make a bat sound that way when it hit a baseball”, indeed.