I'd say he more aiming to comfort than impress. The good part is that because of the homogenous paradigm there are three rules to learn about when to retain/rel

I'd say he more aiming to comfort than impress. The good part is that because of the homogenous paradigm there are three rules to learn about when to retain/release. You find them, read them, think about it for 10 minutes, and then get on with programming. You could contrast it with malloc/free in the unix/C ecosystem. Get a pointer back from function X in library Y. What do you do when you are done? free? call X_Z? constraints on the order of freeing dependent objects? That is a trip to the man pages every time.