Brad Cox

Brad J. Cox (May 2, 1944 – January 2, 2021) was an American computer scientist who was known mostly for creating the Objective-C programming language with his business partner Tom Love and for his work in software engineering (specifically software reuse) and software componentry.
Biography.
Cox received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Organic Chemistry and Mathematics from Furman University,
and his Ph.D. from the Department of Mathematical Biology at the University of Chicago.
Among his first known software projects, he wrote a PDP-8 program for simulating clusters of neurons. 
He worked at the National Institutes of Health and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute before moving into the software profession.
Although Cox invented his own programming language, Objective-C, which he used in his early career, he stated in an interview for the "Masterminds of Programming" book that he wasn't interested in programming languages but rather in software components, and he regarded languages as mere tools for building and combining parts of software.
Cox was also an entrepreneur, having founded the Stepstone company together with Tom Love for releasing the first Objective-C implementation. Later, NeXT acquired Objective-C from Stepstone. Objective-C continued to be the primary programming language for writing software for Apple's OS X and iOS.