Dylan is a multi-paradigm programming language that includes support for functional and object-oriented programming (OOP), and is dynamic and reflective while providing a programming model designed to support generating efficient machine code, including fine-grained control over dynamic and static behaviors. It was created in the early 1990s by a group led by Apple Computer.
Ruby is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language which supports multiple programming paradigms. It was designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity. In Ruby, everything is an object, including primitive data types. It was developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan.
Cocoa is Apple's native object-oriented application programming interface (API) for its desktop operating system macOS.
GNUstep is a free software implementation of the Cocoa Objective-C frameworks, widget toolkit, and application development tools for Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. It is part of the GNU Project.
In computer science, a preprocessor is a program that processes its input data to produce output that is used as input in another program. The output is said to be a preprocessed form of the input data, which is often used by some subsequent programs like compilers. The amount and kind of processing done depends on the nature of the preprocessor; some preprocessors are only capable of performing relatively simple textual substitutions and macro expansions, while others have the power of full-fledged programming languages.
AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. that facilitates automated control over scriptable Mac applications. First introduced in System 7, it is currently included in all versions of macOS as part of a package of system automation tools. The term "AppleScript" may refer to the language itself, to an individual script written in the language, or, informally, to the macOS Open Scripting Architecture that underlies the language.
Bytecode is a form of instruction set designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter. Unlike human-readable source code, bytecodes are compact numeric codes, constants, and references that encode the result of compiler parsing and performing semantic analysis of things like type, scope, and nesting depths of program objects.
This is a "genealogy" of programming languages. Languages are categorized under the ancestor language with the strongest influence. Those ancestor languages are listed in alphabetic order. Any such categorization has a large arbitrary element, since programming languages often incorporate major ideas from multiple sources.
In object-oriented programming, a metaclass is a class whose instances are also classes. Just as an ordinary class defines the behavior of certain objects, a metaclass defines the behavior of certain classes and their instances. Not all object-oriented programming languages support metaclasses. Among those that do, the extent to which metaclasses can override any given aspect of class behavior varies. Metaclasses can be implemented by having classes be first-class citizens, in which case a metaclass is simply an object that constructs classes. Each language has its own metaobject protocol, a set of rules that govern how objects, classes, and metaclasses interact.
RubyCocoa is a macOS framework that provides a bridge between the Ruby and the Objective-C programming languages, allowing the user to manipulate Objective-C objects from Ruby, and vice versa. It makes it possible to write a Cocoa application completely in Ruby as well as to write an application that mixes Ruby and Objective-C code. An Apple project called MacRuby was under development to replace RubyCocoa in 2008. A proprietary spin-off called RubyMotion was subsequently released in 2012, available for iOS, macOS and Android.
Apple events are the message-based interprocess communication mechanism in Mac OS, first making an appearance in System 7 and supported by every version of the classic Mac OS since then and by macOS. Apple events describe "high-level" events such as "open document" or "print file", whereas earlier OSs had supported much more basic events, namely "click" and "keypress". Apple events form the basis of the Mac OS scripting system, the Open Scripting Architecture.
PyObjC is a bidirectional bridge between the Python and Objective-C programming languages, allowing programmers to use and extend existing Objective-C libraries, such as Apple's Cocoa framework, using Python.
Programming languages are used for controlling the behavior of a machine. Like natural languages, programming languages follow rules for syntax and semantics.
The Apple Developer Tools are a suite of software tools from Apple to aid in making software dynamic titles for the macOS and iOS platforms. The developer tools were formerly included on macOS install media, but are now exclusively distributed over the Internet. As of macOS 10.12, Xcode is available as a free download from the Mac App Store.
libffi is a foreign function interface library. It provides a C programming language interface for calling natively compiled functions given information about the target function at run time instead of compile time. It also implements the opposite functionality: libffi can produce a pointer to a function that can accept and decode any combination of arguments defined at run time.
Emacs, originally named EMACS, is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on its direct descendant, GNU Emacs, is ongoing; its latest version is 29.1, released July 2023.
MacRuby is a discontinued implementation of the Ruby language that ran on the Objective-C runtime and CoreFoundation framework under development by Apple Inc. which "was supposed to replace RubyCocoa". It targeted Ruby 1.9 and used the high performance LLVM compiler infrastructure starting with version 0.5. It supports both ahead-of-time and just-in-time compilation.
Objective-C is a high-level general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXTSTEP operating system. Due to Apple macOS’s direct lineage from NeXTSTEP, Objective-C was the standard programming language used, supported, and promoted by Apple for developing macOS and iOS applications until the introduction of the Swift programming language in 2014.
Nim is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, statically typed, compiled high-level systems programming language, designed and developed by a team around Andreas Rumpf. Nim is designed to be "efficient, expressive, and elegant", supporting metaprogramming, functional, message passing, procedural, and object-oriented programming styles by providing several features such as compile time code generation, algebraic data types, a foreign function interface (FFI) with C, C++, Objective-C, and JavaScript, and supporting compiling to those same languages as intermediate representations.
