Dr. Brad J. Cox, the father of the programming language Objective-C, passed away in his home on January 2, 2021, at the age of 77.
Dr. Cox is a computer scientist who created the Objective-C programming language with his business partner Tom Love and has made great achievements in software engineering (especially software reuse) and software components.
Dr. Cox was born on May 2, 1944, in Fort Benning, Georgia, and grew up on a dairy farm in South Carolina. He found himself interested in science since he was a child. After graduating from Lake City High School, he received a Bachelor of Science and Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry and Mathematics from Furman University, and then entered the Department of Mathematical Biology at the University of Chicago, where he was engaged in early neural network research.
In the research, the first software he wrote was the PDP-8 program that simulated neuron clusters. Then he found that he was more interested in computers, so he joined the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT), later joined Schlumberger-Doll Research Labs, and eventually founded his own company, Productivity Products International (PPI) in Connecticut. Called Stepstone, released the first Objective-C implementation.
It is learned that the predecessor of Objective-C was the C language extension written by Dr. Cox and his colleague Tom Love at ITT. At that time, Dr. Cox hoped that the C language could have some of the features of the Smalltalk language, so he wrote this extension.
After Jobs was kicked out of Apple in 1988, NeXT Computer, the company he founded, bought the license for Objective-C. Until the Swift language matures, Objective-C is still the main programming language for OS X and iOS software.
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