What do you regret you didn't know when started programming for iOS or Android?
Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
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Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#2I should’ve known that it’s turtles all the way down. Considering how many years I’ve sunk into programming for other platforms, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but I got suckered into believing that mobile computing platforms represented a significant enough paradigm shift to allow for starting with a cleaner slate.
Not true! Having gotten into iOS development over the past couple of years, I’ve come to realize that seemingly no attempt has been made to actually clear the cobwebs on this shiny, relatively new platform.
For example, SwiftUI is just an abstraction layer for UIKit, which itself is (keep me honest, HN) an abstraction for some mishmash of Cocoa, Display PostScript and Metal. Bits of NeXTSTEP are everywhere still, even when using Apple’s latest and greatest programming paradigms.
Don’t get me wrong, iOS is great, and I love it to death. However, the baggage signals to me that a massive opportunity to start anew has been missed.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#3I regret not knowing about cross-platform development such as Flutter and ReactOS.
I also regret not buying a book explaining all the concepts in as simple a manner as possible. As a semi-amateur programmer, I feel like most of the documentation is meant to refresh the memories of people who have been developing apps for years; they're extremely beginner-hostile.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#4I should’ve known that it’s turtles all the way down. Considering how many years I’ve sunk into programming for other platforms, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but I got suckered into believing that mobile computing platforms represented a significant enough paradigm shift to allow for starting with a cleaner slate. Not true! Having gotten into iOS development over the past couple of years, I’ve come to real…
SwiftUI isn’t UIKit-specific. Display Postscript hasn’t existed since the OS was called NeXT, 20+ years ago, and was never on any iDevice. Cocoa is an alias for AppKit + CoreData, and iOS uses CocoaTouch instead.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#5I should’ve known that it’s turtles all the way down. Considering how many years I’ve sunk into programming for other platforms, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but I got suckered into believing that mobile computing platforms represented a significant enough paradigm shift to allow for starting with a cleaner slate. Not true! Having gotten into iOS development over the past couple of years, I’ve come to real…
SwiftUI isn’t UIKit-specific. Display Postscript hasn’t existed since the OS was called NeXT, 20+ years ago, and was never on any iDevice. Cocoa is an alias for AppKit + CoreData, and iOS uses CocoaTouch instead.
You’re right, yet this doesn’t directly address what parent said, in fact it’s somewhat agreeing with the point, that there’s a ton of influence left behind by these things, even though they are not there anymore.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#6I regret not knowing about cross-platform development such as Flutter and ReactOS. I also regret not buying a book explaining all the concepts in as simple a manner as possible. As a semi-amateur programmer, I feel like most of the documentation is meant to refresh the memories of people who have been developing apps for years; they're extremely beginner-hostile.
Agreed. This absolutely kills me when people say “just read the documentation” or “the documentation is very good” as a reason why they don’t produce examples or templates or starter kits. Not all of us are CS majors or programmers in large teams or with decades of experience to fall back on. Just reading the documentation isn’t enough to get me into a new framework or language. I need to see practical examples.
For mobile development, this is why Expo was so crucial for me to understand how React Native works.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#7I should’ve known that it’s turtles all the way down. Considering how many years I’ve sunk into programming for other platforms, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but I got suckered into believing that mobile computing platforms represented a significant enough paradigm shift to allow for starting with a cleaner slate. Not true! Having gotten into iOS development over the past couple of years, I’ve come to real…
SwiftUI isn’t UIKit-specific. Display Postscript hasn’t existed since the OS was called NeXT, 20+ years ago, and was never on any iDevice. Cocoa is an alias for AppKit + CoreData, and iOS uses CocoaTouch instead.
Display PostScript is in Apple Mac OS X Server 1.0 and then abandoned in favor of Quartz and PDF.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#8I regret not knowing about cross-platform development such as Flutter and ReactOS. I also regret not buying a book explaining all the concepts in as simple a manner as possible. As a semi-amateur programmer, I feel like most of the documentation is meant to refresh the memories of people who have been developing apps for years; they're extremely beginner-hostile.
React? ReactOS is the open source version of Windows NT
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#9On the iOS side, I regret not knowing how horrible Xcode is and how horrible Apple's documentation is. On the Android side, I regret not realizing that no matter what kind of slick new well documented APIs Google releases we will all be writing code for Android 4.4 for the rest of our lives. Also, I wish I knew mobile developers are some of the lowest paid developers other than game industry peons.
Re: Ask HN: What do you regret you didn't know when programming for iOS or Android?
#10I should’ve known that it’s turtles all the way down. Considering how many years I’ve sunk into programming for other platforms, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but I got suckered into believing that mobile computing platforms represented a significant enough paradigm shift to allow for starting with a cleaner slate. Not true! Having gotten into iOS development over the past couple of years, I’ve come to real…
> Don’t get me wrong, iOS is great, and I love it to death. However, the baggage signals to me that a massive opportunity to start anew has been missed.
I guess that's what Flutter is doing (for both iOS and Android).