Objective-c is basically typing for the fun of it.

concatenate.js

// JS 
var one = "Hello",
var two = "World";
var three = one + " " + two;

// Go
one, two := "Hello", "World"
three := one + " " + two

// PHP 
$one = "Hello";
$two = "World";
$three = $one . " " . $two;

// Swift
let one = "Hello"
let two = "World"
let three = one + " " + two;

// Objective-C
NSString *one = @"Hello";
NSString *two = @"World";
NSString *three = [[one stringByAppendingString:" "] tringByAppendingString:two]

Poor example. There's no need for stringWithFormat here. Just do:

NSLog("%@ %@", one, two);

Also you can write:

NSString *one = @"Hello", *two = @"World";

Even if just concatenating
[one stringByAppendingString:two]

Thanks @tomsterritt, that did help shorten the code.

@invariant, my mistake using NSLog/Println in the examples. The point was to concatenate strings, not find a quick way to print them.

All of these issues are because of backwards compatibility with C, though.

You have to have @'s in front of all the literal a because, in C, "" is a char*, {} denotes scope, structs, or arrays, etc.

And they can't override + to concatenate strings, because that breaks C compatibility. +, with two pointers, adds their addresses.

You concatenation with a space can be done with:
NSString *three = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@ %@", one, two];

This is because of Objective-C's Smalltalk routes. It's verbose because the syntax was designed for message passing. Text processing is very verbose in Objective-C. Apple did a great job of modernising the language to 2.0 which cuts down a little on the boilerplate. Swift takes things further.

This will work:

NSString *three = @"Hello" @" " @"World";

All but the first @ are optional.