Remembering Brad J. Cox: The Visionary Behind Objective‑C and Its Legacy

Brad J. Cox, known as the father of Objective‑C, died on 2 January 2021 at the age of 77.

For developers in the Apple ecosystem, Objective‑C is a familiar language that powered the company’s software dominance; Cox co‑created it with Tom Love and is also renowned for his work on software reuse and component‑based engineering.

After the news of his death, many posted tributes on Hacker News, recalling his impact on programming language evolution. One commenter wrote, “I love Objective‑C; learning it reignited my passion for coding.”

“I wrote an Objective‑C drone program as a hobby while still working in Java. Although I later abandoned it, the experience was incredibly rewarding.”

Cox’s early life began on a dairy farm in Bainbridge, Georgia (born 2 May 1944). He earned a B.S. from Furman University and a Ph.D. in mathematical biology from the University of Chicago, conducting early research on neural networks.

He later worked at ITT, Schlumberger‑Doll Research Labs, and founded Productivity Products International (later Stepstone). His first notable software project involved writing a PDP‑8 program to simulate neuron clusters, and he also held positions at the NIH and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

His online course “Taming the Electronic Frontier” won the 1998 Paul Allen Distance Education Award. He authored the seminal books “Object‑Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach” (1991) and “Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier” (1996), the latter translated into ten languages.

Cox also contributed to early online education at George Mason University, consulted for Boeing and the Pentagon, and later returned to neural networks, applying machine learning and data science to cybersecurity.

Beyond his technical work, Cox enjoyed music—playing piano and guitar in a bluegrass band—traveling, scuba diving, and humor.

Objective‑C is a general‑purpose, high‑level, object‑oriented language that extends ANSI C with Smalltalk‑style messaging. It can be compiled with GCC or Clang (LLVM backend) and runs on a small C‑based runtime library, allowing seamless integration with existing C code.

The language was born when Cox and Love, while at ITT, created a C pre‑processor to add Smalltalk capabilities, eventually leading to Objective‑C.

In 1983 they founded PPI to commercialize Objective‑C and its libraries, later renaming the company StepStone. Cox’s 1986 book detailed the language’s design philosophy.

Apple now holds the trademark for Objective‑C. After Steve Jobs left Apple, NeXT acquired the language’s license; Apple’s 1996 acquisition of NeXT brought Objective‑C into Mac OS X (later macOS) and iOS, where it remains a primary language alongside Swift.

Objective‑C’s small runtime and compatibility with existing C tools lower the entry barrier, but it lacks namespaces, operator overloading, multiple inheritance, and static optimizations, leading Apple to encourage migration to Swift. Its popularity has declined on the TIOBE index, while Swift’s ranking has risen.

In 2015, predictions claimed Swift would replace Objective‑C within five years; although Swift has surged, the extensive existing Objective‑C codebase means full replacement will take longer.

According to a 2022 Upwork survey, Objective‑C commands the highest hourly rates among programming languages on the platform, with freelancers earning about $66 per hour.

Some observers note that, unlike the bustling Windows development scene, Objective‑C remains a solitary yet remarkable technology thriving on the Mac platform.