iOSRuby?
Objective C is awesome except for the awful syntax. MacRuby is very close to nirvana and I’m pretty sure Apple could make Ruby the next main language if they wanted to. Sure, Objective C would stick around, but only for super high performance code, drivers, and other special projects. I love Ruby, and I think Ruby shares the same values as Apple: powerful, clean, simple, elegant, and at times a tiny bit quirky.
However, knowing Apple’s thinking about competitive advantage I wouldn’t be surprised if they decide to create a brand new language. Apple owns the dominant mobile platform and a new elegant programming language would give developers one more reason to put all their eggs in the iOS basket.
In the midst of all of the iPhone’s and iPad’s success it may not be apparent that Apple has a serious problem today: iOS development is not productive at all. You need to hire very expensive, hard-to-find developers to write good iPhone software. One bad developer can easily ruin the stability of the entire app and memory allocation or wild pointer bugs can be hard to track down. A new language could solve these problems and bring the same elegance of Apple’s products to the development tools. Ruby or not, I hope that Apple makes a major new language announcement at the WWDC 2011… or sooner.