We have all read pg's essays where he extols the virtues of Lisp, compared to other languages. His primary argument, as best as I can tell, is you can write programs with far less code than in other languages. Such an advantage would be a big win for the platform, and we may come to a time when Apple is forced to do it, because everybody else has, and they risk being left behind.

Objective-C is becoming a weird frankenlanguage. It already was, arguably: a thin layer of smalltalk-like OO sitting on top of C. Just recently, Apple added blocks, which are like continuations in other languages. Maybe that's a good thing, but I think it would be a better thing if we went with a language that had those types of concepts from the beginning.

It has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread that Microsoft has already had their platform-two-dot-oh epiphany, which was .Net: managed languages with automatic garbage collection, and so on. If this evolves into a big win for programmers, Apple will be forced to follow suit.

The biggest argument I can think of for Apple not to try a new systems language is that their cash cow right now is the iOS platform. Doing this now would no doubt cause serious memory and CPU pressure on small devices which can't afford it. So knowing Apple, their likely answer to that would be to come out with a new generation of devices that are no longer compatible with objc, which you have to rewrite everything for.

Saving even an hour writing something as a few terse lines means nothing if in 6 months you need days to decipher and debug it. The code has to remain clear somehow. About the only acceptable use of a clever one-liner is when it provably reduces the runtime of the generated machine code by a significant amount...and even then, the hour you saved not writing code had better be spent writing a block of comments to explain your one-liner.

Yes, Objective-C is weird. But put yourself in the seat of a language parser; it's already a very difficult problem to ensure that some languages parse correctly and unambiguously. If you introduce new syntax that is "weird", it's actually safer than doing something that may cause subtle incompatibilities with all the code that's been compiled a certain way for decades. And that code has proven the "weird" language is practical, whereas a brand new language (no matter how perfectly designed it seems to be) may actually have parser corner cases that have not been ironed out yet.

Garbage collection is a benefit in many situations, but Apple has managed to create a very responsive phone where mere milliseconds are just perceptible enough to make a user think "my iPhone feels fast, and this other phone feels slow". Right now, performance matters most, and manual memory management is an edge for Apple. It's important to make programmers happy, but not as important as it is to sell things to users.

Timing is everything. That epiphany has not yet lead to what it promised originally: a consumer OS in managed code, with major applications in C#.

I do not think that will happen soon, either. => Apple will probably be fine with a OS written in C with some added functionality, especially if they manage to build one or more managed environments on top of it. That way, companies can build their in-house stuff in managed languages, while the core stuff remains finely tuned C.

I do not think that is the most beautiful solution, but it may well be the pragmatic approach that wins the race.