Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, and early object-oriented programming (2016)

This is very narrow history. Basically a history that excludes everything that isn't Jobs walk to glory and perfection and domination. Ignore many important points, problems, accidents, alternatives and so on.

NeXT used 'Display Postscript' a display server that was basically a inferior copy of Sun's NeWS system. This was later changed because NeXT was to small and Adobe didn't want to support Display Postscript anymore. Sun of course killed NeWS because they wanted to be a 'standard'. Next didn't care about standards. They had less applications then CDE Unix, and far lower deployment in the 90s.

Objective C is one of many language that you could use to build UI libraries on top of some display system. Objective C wasn't the best or inherently better then many others. Objective C adoption by Next was kind of a historical accident based on office location.

Having something VM based for UI development isn't actually that much of an issue, when the hardware manufacture delivers the OS with the VM included. And usually it his the hardware manufacture that delivers the OS. And VM bases system can be integrated well with the core OS, object oriented or not. And that VM are inherently to slow is also questionable, specially for UI apps that can use C libraries and the Display Server for the most performance relevant stuff.

Apple itself had a very nice system for UI development on Dylan that was arguable better in many way then the Next system. But when Steve Jobs came and they had Next, that wasn't developed anymore.

What Jobs showed of in the late 90s wasn't exactly revolutionary stuff. But Jobs always presents everything as revolutionary.

IPhone development in 2010 working the same as Next development in 1990 is a sign of 'failure', not of success.

I actually used the Apple Dylan environment. IIRC, it required 48MB RAM -- yes, M -- to launch, which was extremely an extremely large amount at the time -- as in, you probably needed to buy more RAM to run it -- and was itself written in Macintosh Common Lisp instead of self-hosting. UI development? Thing could barely run on a contemporary Mac. Every efficiency claim that was made for it was unproven. Maybe it could have been great, but it certainly needed at least a couple of years more bake time. The NeXT runtime existed and its performance characteristics were understood.

Virtual memory was a huge issue for UI development with a retained-mode system like DPS; thrashing window contents is very not fun if you want a responsive UI. Apple spent years optimizing VM for this purpose after the NeXT purchase.