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Comment by misiti3780 | Hacker News Reader

i agree with you, although i think you are forgetting to add (and maybe it is implied here and i missed it) that learning mobile development requires you to not only learn new language APIs in objC/swift, but you also have to learn some new design patterns (delegation, etc.) and most importantly the SDKs (CocoaTouch)

if you can use react native and avoid learning a lot of this it is a big win - I havnt used it yet, and I have a hard time believing it a mobile only company would use it to build their mobile app, but i am excited where it is going.

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>learning mobile development requires you to not only learn new language APIs in objC/swift, but you also have to learn some new design patterns (delegation, etc.)

Delegation has been a standard feature of desktop APIs for decades. Not just on things like Smalltalk and ObjC -- it has been the standard .NET model for UI events since C# 1.0.

sure but the majority of developers writing code write webapps. Some there are some desktop apps out there but not a lot.

Going to need a source on that 'majority' of which you speak of as if its a fact. Sure, web development is popular, but there are a _lot_ of developers working on other things (which potentially include delegation). Also, I'm sure you'll many web frameworks that use the delegation pattern.

I'd say the majority of developers write enterprise code, whether web or not.

So here's the real bear of it, and the crux of my argument.

The delegate thing is an iOS thing. Android uses a totally different pattern. I mean, there are delegates, to be sure, but android loves their anonymous inner classes in many of those cases. (Which is closer to idiomatic js IMHO.)

So on a language level sure, easy peasy, you could delegate in javascript all day long (and you do). But on a platform level, nuh-uh. One is going left and the other is going right. How do you meet in the middle? What fine line gets scrubbed in between?

React-Native pattern with delegates is passing down functionHandlers to childComponents that would trigger them.

Except Objective-C (and Swift) had protocol conformance. Though come to think of it TypeScript allows you define an interface for a Component, one of those attributes could be a function.

Not really getting away from it. ;-)

Isn't delegation just a slight variation on callbacks?

Basically yeah. An object can have one delegate object, which implements a set of required and optional methods defined in a protocol. So the delegate can add customized behavior to an object without subclassing.

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