This.

HUGE fan of Objective-C, back from the NeXT days. Been writing iOS apps since ARC was optional and I never used it, because *I* knew how to alloc and free memory. Yeah, that meant it was a pain in the ass when Apple made ARC a requirement.

I miss introspection, sure. But optionals, tuples, native unicode support, default parameters, conditional generics, and a consistent calling syntax just makes my life easier. Add to that first-class immutable structs, better functional programming support, and stronger exception handling, and I just enjoy programming Swift more than Objective-C.

It's not like dynamic dispatch went away -- it just got shuffled to object extensions.

That said, there are some things I don't like about Swift: lack of introspection (as I admitted), and especially still using ARC for memory management. While it may be fast, resolving retention cycles can be difficult, especially if one half of the retention is in some Cocoa library.

Swift doesn't lock you into Apple products. It's an open-source language, for cryin' out loud. What locks you into Apple products are the libraries you use to target a specific platform. Just like MFC locks you into Microsoft products.

I can see why some people might prefer Objective-C. I still look on it fondly as the best of the C-based OO languages. Hell, I still love programming in straight-up C.

I'm just glad I made the jump to Swift.

Oh, I'm also moving to Kotlin for my Android projects for many of the same reasons.

Most lower cost providers still charge by the minute.

ref: B.A ... R.B.A. (obscure references, it was the mid/late 90's)

It does seem a little silly though, that it's fine we eat it. Hell, some people brush their teeth with it. But "Oh no, don't use the substitute in an emergency!".

Makes *me* feel like a youngster.

You can kind of game them on data, SMS and voice to keep your costs near zero.

Granted, certainly not for everyone but there is nothing less expensive and coverage in the States is fine.

As a long time SQA/HQA eng, this is an awesome question. I've been around a lot of blocks. New build. Broken. Here's another one. Broken. My Golden Rule? Stay until it works. I'd so much rather have a good build than something slapped together. It wastes everyone's time.

I had the (shall I say it) honor of working directly with Vint Cerf at MCI back in the early 90's, part of the triad or more that formed the earliest foundations. We had some interesting conversations.

Yet.

When I looked at Magento it was a sieve peppered with .50 caliber holes. I passed.

Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these.

The downside is, Signal is buggy (not security wise) on older android releases. And that's where an awful lot of people such as myself are.

-jim

I'm taking that with large grains of salt, soon to be extricated as kidney stones.

"In fact, with Chrome's regular additions and changes, developers have to keep up to ensure they are taking advantage of everything available. "

Uh, no. You don't. The page you developed yesterday (or in 2000) should display just the same if you did it right in the first place. If not it's the browsers fault, not yours for "not keeping up". It's a fucking web browser.