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Brad Cox , the inventor of the programming language Objective-C , died recently at his home in Virginia at the age of 76.
Brad Cox is a well-known computer scientist. He invented the object-oriented programming (OOP) language Objective-C and later became the main development language for Apple's OS X and iOS devices.
In addition, he has also made important contributions to software engineering and software components.
Brad Cox himself is also passionate about education. In 1991, he published the book "Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Method", and he is also committed to developing early online courses through the Internet.
Finally, Dr. Cox returned to his original neural network research, dedicated to applying machine learning and data science to network security.
Early experiences
Brad Cox was born in Fort Benning, Georgia in 1944. He majored in organic chemistry and mathematics at Furman University, and then received a PhD in mathematical biology from the University of Chicago.
At the University of Chicago, Cox engaged in early research on neural networks. In 1970, he wrote a PDP-8 program to simulate neuron clusters and published related papers in the Journal of Behavioral Research.
After graduation, Cox joined the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT), and later joined the Schlumbeger Doll Research Laboratory, which became his starting point for the creation of the Objective-C language.
Invention of the Objective-C language
In the 1980s, object-oriented programming became a trend. Although there was already an OOP language like Smalltalk at that time, the industry needed an OOP language compatible with Unix and C environments.
In 1981, Cox quickly wrote an object-oriented pre-compiler (OOPC), which can translate Smalltalk-like syntax into C language, which is the predecessor of Objective-C.
His leader Tom Love believes that this object-oriented solution is very marketable, so the two left the company together and founded PPI, which was later renamed Stepstone .
△ Stepstone company site
At PPI, Cox developed the original OOPC into Objective-C.
He believes that Objective-C will lead to a software industry revolution, because this language has created a "software-IC" market.
Guofen should be familiar with the following story.
In 1985, Jobs was squeezed out of Apple and founded the NeXT Computer Company. Since then, NeXT has become an important customer of Objective-C, and its operating system NeXTSTEP has used this language for development.
Although NeXT, founded by Jobs, failed to stand in the market in terms of hardware, it was a great success in terms of software.
In 1994, Stepstone founded by Cox went bankrupt, and all rights in Objective-C were acquired by NeXT.
In 1997, NeXT was acquired by Apple, and Jobs returned to Apple in this way. NeXT's software system was installed on Macintosh computers and developed into the OS X operating system.
Objective-C also naturally became the development language of Apple's OS X system. Later, with the birth of the iPhone in 2007, it was used by more and more developers.
To this day, we can still see the traces of Brad Cox in the Objective-C language: the prefix NS of the variable type is the abbreviation of the NeXTSTEP operating system.
Although Apple introduced the Swift language with the intention of replacing it in 2014, Objective-C is still one of the main development languages for iOS.
anecdote
Although Cox invented the programming language Objective-C, he said in an interview with "Master of Programming" in 2019 that he himself is not interested in programming languages. He believes that languages are only tools for building and combining various parts of software.
Brad Cox and his wife met a German couple during a trip, talked to them, and discovered that each other was a programmer. Cox stated that he was also a programmer, and the two parties started the following dialogue:
"what do you do?"
"I invented the Objective-C language."
"No, that was done by Brad Cox."
"I am Brad Cox."
Brad Cox obituary:
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/scnow/name/brad-cox-obituary?pid=197454225
The origin and development of Objective-C:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386332
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