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Comment by novok | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s iOS libs (not swift ui) although not well documented in parts, is probably the most complete and self consistent set of ui dev libraries around to develop against. Android and web are far more chaotic. I haven’t done windows dev so maybe that is better but nobody does windows desktop anyway.

Worst part of it is the lack of a full open source stack and build speed / xcode stability for swift, but its not bad if your just 1-5 engineers in one app. But if you scale to 30+ with +1 million lines after a few years it starts getting real bad unless you architect your app with devapps like airbnb did: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/designing-for-producti...

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Windows Desktop has much more documentation than both Android and iOS. It does take a bit of practice to find things in MSDN, but if it exists^1, then I'll be very surprised if it's not documented. (Except Azure APIs, I don't know why Azure seemed to miss out)

1: By exists I mean a public API. Even some APIs that aren't intended to be used by applications have documentation. Eg: RtlGenRandom.

I saw someone mentioning that in some places the MSDN documentation was light on detail because because in the early days (Win32/MFC/AFX) they were trying to sell training and certifications with the actual detail in it.

The original MSDN came on a bunch of CDs but it moved to online only a long time ago.

It has always been comprehensive.

The problem I have found lately is some of the more esoteric stuff seems to have disappeared. That and the urls changing and poor SEO.

I'm from germany and it makes me so mad that they automatically redirect me to some shitty autotranslated german site. I have to manually change the "de-de" to "en-us" in the url all the time when browsing microsoft docs.

> but nobody does windows desktop anyway

That much is fairly true now though. It just doesn't make sense to build an enterprise app that is windows native and can't run on any other OS/be accessed via web.

android isn't more chaotic back then for me, probably because java docs are literally everywhere. Hard to find and navigate, but most of the time I know where to find things.

Swift is its own language and libraries, but I can't seem to find stuff in apple's website. I remember many times I am literally stuck, don't know where to read the definition or how to do stuff, then I end up having to ask people in reddit / SO. I actually still find people constantly complaining about the the docs in reddit every now and then.

Docs is really really important, having developed with laravel, moved to django, and react for FE, I just realise that their docs are really really good

There's a free book "The Swift Programming Language" that should answer most questions about the Swift language and its standard library. The web version is here: https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/index.html

Android is even more so, because Android Java isn't Java, and there are lots of issues with stuff that just gets dumped into some github repo from Google where we are supposed to learn from sample code and that is it.

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