This post is somewhat ahistorical as far as the objective-c content is concerned.. perhaps Brad Cox had the author’s conception of how one should write ObjC, but what he describes was definitely not how Apple thought about or encouraged folks to program far far before the iPhone gold rush. Objective-C’s clean interop with C is a major selling point, but dropping down to C has long been a technique to be employed only in the targeted areas where it’s important.
Yeah there's plenty of criticisms for ObjC, but this post kinda makes no sense to me. No one wrote ObjC like that and to make a coherent argument as to why would require a historical non fiction book. I'm not sure who the target demographic for this post is, and it's Java section makes sense, but the ObjC section doesn't seem focused. It kinda turned into a "OO developers are stupid" post. I'm a game dev (primarily iPhone/ObjC!) - we started that shit and I can't get on board here.
I don't think the Java section makes sense either. I'm no historian, but I don't think it was ease of serialisation that led to huge amounts of config in Java. I suspect that was more to do with its status as an "enterprise" language.
Having encountered a similar proliferation of config in "enterprise" C++ (where it's usually not implemented in terms of serialisation) it was mostly driven by a need to modify the behaviour of systems in production without having to go through software release processes that were often cumbersome and beaurocratic.
(Source: joined the Cocoa team in 2005.)