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Comment by spenvo | Hacker News Reader

The article has a good message overall but I think this title works against it. A much younger and more impressionable version of myself heard Marco Arment on a podcast around 2010 saying how difficult iOS programming was, and I kind of believed him at face value. It was 9 years before I gave iOS/macOS programming another shot, and I was more productive than I'd been in any other programming language. I agree with the article that telling people programming is "easy" is probably not a good idea either.

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In fairness, over 9 years it got significantly nicer to program for.

That's true, by leaps and bounds, really

Having written for both platforms at the time, I don't know about 2010 but by around 2011 or 2012 it was sure as shit easier to program for than Android. By a long shot. And a breeze to maintain an actively-developed app in the field, by comparison. Maybe there were also-ran mobile platforms that were easier, or not-apples-to-apples comparisons with, say, desktop development, where that's easier, but if you wanted native mobile dev Apple was a piece of cake (pie?) compared to its main competition.

[Edit: Nb my perspective is that of someone who'd never used a Mac full-time before working in mobile development, had never even looked at Obj. C before, was quite familiar with Linux and to some extent Windows, and had a passing familiarity with Java, so if anything my background should have biased me toward Android, slightly. Last time I touched native on the two platforms was, oh, 2017 maybe, and it was still true.]

Not only did the language change significantly in 9 years, your skills as a programmer likely did as well. How can you evaluate the truth of the original statement given these factors?

I'm saying it turned me off to iOS programming b/c it made it feel out of reach, regardless of whether it was true or not. Regardless of language, when you list all the reasons it is difficult to program (the things you may have spent years getting past/overcoming) it's going to turn new people away from it

Are you using Swift? Swift was released in 2014.

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