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Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

"And I just don't understand why."

I think you've correctly identified the source of confusion -- value vs reference. To you, that might be plain as day. But, to many iOS devs, they really couldn't explain the nuances.

I mean, look how much trouble beginner programmers have with the concept of Pointers for pete's sake.

But, I think you're right -- weird rules and guidelines just confuse the issue.

Andy Matuschak's functional swift talk puts the ref vs value discussion in practical terms of a Khan Academy drawing app:

http://2014.funswiftconf.com/speakers/andy.html

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The other issue is that too many programmers these days don't have a solid computer science background... I'm all for people being self-taught and learning programming on their own... But the downside of that prevents individuals from learning how things work at a lower level.

I've never written a line of Obj-C or Swift in my life, but all you have to tell me is "struct = value based, class = referenced based" and I immediately know how it works...

I'm going to take issue with this. This has nothing to do with having a solid computer science background -- in fact, I've seen way more architecture astronauts with CS degrees.

It has to do with learning stuff on a lower level -- whether or not you attend a school to do so. Us autodidacts who grew up on assembly language and C code will beg to differ on your use of the word "prevents".

I presume he's not talking about long-time autodidacts. He's talking about the many programmers who have six months of JavaScript experience from a bootcamp and are learning Swift.

I guess I'll ask this here, since you seem to know what you're talking about. I'm a cs major, and I just finished my first c class. I quite enjoyed getting my feet wet with the lower level aspects of c, c doesn't hold your hand much (compared to java or python at least) and I liked that you really have to think about what you want, and the best way to get it with c.

Do you have any books or exercises to recommend to help further my understanding of low-level computing? I'll be taking too and compilers in the fall, but I'd like to keep digging on my own.

The issue is that most of the cocoa framework requires classes to work with it. For anything UI, you are going to be dealing with reference semantics unless apple gives us an alternative to cocoa touch like http://componentkit.org

I don't doubt that a lot of people fail to understand value versus reference semantics. What I find weird is how, rather than learning it, people keep trying to come up with crazy rules to avoid learning it. I guess they don't realize that it's the key here.

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