You're right, memory management was a requirement in the early days and it created more cognitive load on the dev in exchange for not having to stall for garbag

You're right, memory management was a requirement in the early days and it created more cognitive load on the dev in exchange for not having to stall for garbage collection. But Objective-C has had automatic reference counting since around 2011. Retain and release aren't used anymore. I have talked to many people who have had a hard time getting past the square brackets - I did at first too. But now I think of them as book ends around the work. In my opinion, they are clearer to divide actions with. They can of course be abused with many layers of [[[]]], but so can the optional unwrapping code golf one-liners I see written in Swift. And I agree with you, block syntax is terribly hard to remember. I still copy paste or use typedefs. But I love using blocks – they've done so much for readability of asynchronous code. The language really has come a long way since the first iPhone.