Objective-C was developed primarily by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s at their company Stepstone. Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. It is the programming language used by Apple and their application programming interfaces (APIs) such as Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. It was one of the major languages used by NeXT for its NeXTSTEP operating system.