Comment by flipgimble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flipgimble | Hacker News Reader

While the article has a some good points about not over-engineering unless you need it, I’m really put off by the pissed off and dismissive attitude. Ex “here’s another wannabe who never bothered to learn”, “This pisses me off“, “I’ve spent 15 years” etc.

This shows the author doesn’t really understand why you might decide to use an architecture that departs from the apple MVC orthodoxy, and despite “years of experience” never worked on a large, multi platform project, that tried to avoid 1st party tool lock-in, or actually implemented in-depth testing beyond the anemic xcode support.

The truth is that Apple mostly cares about providing a good UI SDK with general platform services, but is agnostic about how any one app is architected. It makes sense they will preach the simplest and most general pattern: MVC.

Or how about not pissing on other people’s valid ideas because you are offended and want to show off your own contrarian cleverness?

>Or how about not pissing on other people’s valid ideas because you are offended and want to show off your own contrarian cleverness?

How about not calling other people's criticism "showing off", "contrarian cleverness" and "pissing"?

> actually implemented in-depth testing beyond the anemic xcode support

I think this is the key motivator for people looking at alternative architectures. My guess is most people wouldn't stray very far from basic UIKIt/MVC if the established practices weren't so hard to unit test.

I see the experimentation with alternative approaches as the iOS community going through a phase of maturity, and is a positive signal. Many people in the community care deeply about issues of code quality and testability and while striving for simplicity. The increase in iOS architecture related articles is an indication of unrest and an active search for better practices. I suspect that it is only through these experiments that we will discover the balance we are looking for.

Similarly, I think articles like the OP are a healthy resistance against the pendulum swinging too far the other way. Although I agree with several points made I'm disappointed that testability isn't even mentioned and thus many points ring hollow.

I work on a 90k line application with many views written in VIPER. It’s awful. It’s an arbitrary collection of classes that reduces maintain-ability, readability and ease of debugging.

Agreed, the tone was arrogant and annoying.

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