> In Smalltalk and Objective-C, you just check at runtime whether an object instance responds to a message. This is the original OOP way.

This introduces performance issues larger than the typical ones associated with vtable lookups. Not all domains can afford this today and even fewer in the 80s/90s when these languages were first designed.

> It's sad that OOP was corrupted by the excessively class-centric C++ and Java design patterns.

Both Smalltalk and Objective-C are class based and messages are single-receiver dispatched. So it’s not classes that you’re objecting to. It’s compile-time resolved (eg: vtable) method dispatch vs a more dynamic dispatch with messages.

Ruby, Python, and Javascript all allow for last-resort attribute/message dispatching in various ways: Ruby via `method_missing`, Python by supplying `__getattr__`, and Javascript via Proxy objects.

  Name Iterations Total time (sec) Time per (ns)
  C++ virtual method call 1000000000 1.5 1.5
  IMP-cached message send 1000000000 1.6 1.6

What was so odd was how Apple fumbled the iPhone mini launch by launching the iPhone SE first. At that point there hadn't been a small phone for a few years, There was pent up demand. The SE came out and it was a big success, lots of people wanted ti because it was a small phone.

Then few months later they launched the mini expecting it to sell even more or something. Somehow they missed that everyone that wanted a small phone had just bought the SE, and it just wasn't long enough for them to be worth upgrading to the much better mini.

Had they waited for a year to pass the mini might have done much better because those who wanted a more powerful phone could find an excuse for an upgrade after a year, less then 6 months, not so much.

> The significance of witnesses to humans under various contexts could be explained by the importance of reputation management to our species.

It could also be explained as the researches accidentally recreating "Clever Hans."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

Sadly, this article does not answer the question of why such a concentration of brilliance developed at Göttingen. If we wanted to build a new Göttingen, how would we do it? What factors allowed Göttingen to exist? For most of a century, Germany was leading in most scientific and academic fields, but what allowed this? When we think of the Golden Age of physics we are thinking of a cultural event that had its center in Germany, but why? And why has Germany been so dull and flat ever since? Clearly, building a liberal democracy is not enough to ensure such a cultural event. Much of Germany was liberal but non-democratic during its golden age, as other places were, but what made Germany special at this time?

It seems that the code is the result of the ObjC preprocessor. :-)

Id be interested in a C++ for Swift developers version.