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Yes. Thing is this are de-facto only two platforms alive. Yes. Mobile (and desktop) developers life suck. But someone has to write all that software. And, IMO,

by Svoka 7y ago

Yes. Thing is this are de-facto only two platforms alive. Yes. Mobile (and desktop) developers life suck. But someone has to write all that software. And, IMO, iOS/macOS/Cocoa/Xcode is best out there. And most importantly - most stable. Nice boutique experience, nice API, good documentation, everything is integrated and working. Other platforms are even worse. Way worse. I am also doing Switch, KaiOS, Xbox, PS3/4, did Symbian and like dozen more obscure ones.

w0utert 7y ago
Pretty much this ^ All these rants about XCode/iOS/UIKit/ObjC somehow being a terrible environment to develop for are presuming there is something significantly better out there. There isn't, it seems. You will find developers bitching about literally any development platform out there (except maybe Haskell when you are on HN ;-) My personal experience is limited to C++/ObjC/Java/Python on Linux/macOS/iOS, and I can only agree that ObjC on Apple platforms is by far the easiest and most productive environment for me. I've only dabbled in Swift a tiny bit so far, but my feeling is that it's also a lot less hostile than C++. In terms of toolkits, Cocoa/UIKit is at least as good as Qt, and much better then e.g. GTK or the abominations you have to deal with if you develop Java applications. Don't know about Windows platforms but considering the endless list of technologies and frameworks that are supposed to supersede whatever came before it, it's likely not much better over there.
leeman2016 7y ago
Development on Windows desktop maybe dull, but pretty straight forward/stable/well documented in my opinion
- Svoka 7y ago
  It is. With microsoft it's another problem: too much technologies. All are OK-is, but ultimately deprecated. MFC, WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, you name it. But, to be clear, I think Visual Studio has close 2nd place in desktop development experience after Xcode. Also, IMO, VS is way better IDE that Xcode for generic C++ projects.
consp 7y ago
> And most importantly - most stable I have to restart XCode at least once an hour to get all my breakpoints back and several times a day if it crashes for no apparent reason and boots up with the project missing, empty or missing files. Fortunately I don't do a lot of app development any more but some low level C libs don't compile themselves (no: not possible to do this in any other language). Stable is not what I use to describe XCode. Bloated with "do it the apple way" yes but not stable.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Well, they said "most stable".

by Svoka 7y ago

w0utert 7y ago

Pretty much this ^ All these rants about XCode/iOS/UIKit/ObjC somehow being a terrible environment to develop for are presuming there is something significantly better out there. There isn't, it seems. You will find developers bitching about literally any development platform out there (except maybe Haskell when you are on HN ;-) My personal experience is limited to C++/ObjC/Java/Python on Linux/macOS/iOS, and I can only agree that ObjC on Apple platforms is by far the easiest and most productive environment for me. I've only dabbled in Swift a tiny bit so far, but my feeling is that it's also a lot less hostile than C++. In terms of toolkits, Cocoa/UIKit is at least as good as Qt, and much better then e.g. GTK or the abominations you have to deal with if you develop Java applications. Don't know about Windows platforms but considering the endless list of technologies and frameworks that are supposed to supersede whatever came before it, it's likely not much better over there.

leeman2016 7y ago

Development on Windows desktop maybe dull, but pretty straight forward/stable/well documented in my opinion

Svoka 7y ago
It is. With microsoft it's another problem: too much technologies. All are OK-is, but ultimately deprecated. MFC, WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, you name it. But, to be clear, I think Visual Studio has close 2nd place in desktop development experience after Xcode. Also, IMO, VS is way better IDE that Xcode for generic C++ projects.

consp 7y ago

> And most importantly - most stable I have to restart XCode at least once an hour to get all my breakpoints back and several times a day if it crashes for no apparent reason and boots up with the project missing, empty or missing files. Fortunately I don't do a lot of app development any more but some low level C libs don't compile themselves (no: not possible to do this in any other language). Stable is not what I use to describe XCode. Bloated with "do it the apple way" yes but not stable.

hombre_fatal 7y ago
Well, they said "most stable".