I have written before about the preference for clarity over brevity in the Objective-C/Cocoa world that leads to extraordinarily long method signatures. While I like the expressiveness of this approach, there are occasions where I feel the language could be more concise without giving up anything. Most of the time, this has to do with often-used objects like NSNumber, NSArray, and NSDictionary. I wish Objective-C included a syntax to quickly define object literals of these types as we can already do with strings.

Objective-C has understood the syntax @"Some string" to define a literal string object for a long time (not since the beginning, though: the @"..." was not part of the original implementation of Objective-C). So why not define a similar syntax for other object literals? Here are some I would love to see in a future version of the language:

As an example of how such syntax additions could influence the look of your code, consider the creation of a keyframe animation. Currently:

CAKeyframeAnimation *animation = [CAKeyframeAnimation animationWithKeyPath:@"alpha"];
animation.values   = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:
                      [NSNumber numberWithFloat:1.0f],
                      [NSNumber numberWithFloat:0.8f],
                      [NSNumber numberWithFloat:0.0f],
                      nil];
animation.keyTimes = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:
                      [NSNumber numberWithFloat:0.0f],
                      [NSNumber numberWithFloat:0.6f],
                      [NSNumber numberWithFloat:1.0f],
                      nil];
[self.view.layer addAnimation:animation forKey:@"alpha"];

With the new syntax, this could be written in a much clearer way in my opinion:

CAKeyframeAnimation *animation = [CAKeyframeAnimation animationWithKeyPath:@"alpha"];
animation.values   = @[@1.0f, @0.8f, @0.0f];
animation.keyTimes = @[@0.0f, @0.6f, @1.0f];
[self.view.layer addAnimation:animation forKey:@"alpha"];