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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

I'm not saying Android development or Java are that great but this guy spent two weeks on it. That's not enough time to get a feel for the environment. It doesn't matter what the language is, if you drop a developer into a completely unfamiliar one they will feel awkward annoyed and lost for at least a couple months.

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(author here). You're right that it takes more than a month to get a handle on tricks tools & quirks in a new language / buildsystem.

That said, if you drop me in a dumpster I can tell immediately that it's a hot day. The forum content around the android problems that I had show that the same problems have been cropping up for years with no improvement.

I don't doubt there are real reasons for the rigidity of android interfaces. Could be that the underlying system is written in C and doesn't interface easily with java. Could be limited staff and high legacy support requirements.

No experience on andriod, but I really enjoyed your analogies. Fun to read.

Thanks! Your acoustics business looks awesome.

It does matter what the language / ecosystem is; learning curves are not equal across all of them. Having learnt Go a while back, I was surprised at how short a period it took to feel at least reasonably comfortable & productive with it. I've seen the same with colleagues as well.

That might not be so easily possible for a GUI mobile app though; maybe there's more necessary complexity there. But aiming for simplicity is a good goal to have regardless.

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