Graham Lee discussing the early days of Objective-C message sending:

Reading the OOPC paper, you can tell that this is the start of what became known as Objective-C. It has a special syntax for sending Smalltalk-style messages to objects identified by pointers to structures, though not the syntax you’ll be used to:

someObject = {|Object, "new"|};

{|myArray, "addObject:", someObject|};

The infix notation [myArray addObject:someObject]; came later, but by 1986 Cox had published the first edition of Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach and co-founded Productivity Products International (later Stepstone) to capitalise on the Objective-C language.

Objective-C has really changed a lot over its thirty year existence. I am glad that I get to use it in its current form.

(via Jonathan Penn at Cocoa Manifest)