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Comment by zerostar07 | Hacker News Reader

I think this piece keeps coming up every so many days. It's a great piece of advice, and i think most developers come to the same conclusion after a few years. I think a useful corrolary from this is "Do not reinvent the wheel all the time by changing programming styles, instead try to extend the frontiers of technology" (I 'm looking at you, web frameworks).

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This. I was reading someone's blog the other day about how they were rewriting their app in node.js... whereas a few years before that, I remember that they had rewritten the app in rails... Their product could've been so much further along had they just stuck with php/.net (whatever is was originally).

An app that can be rewritten on a whim is not a significant app. Harsh but true.

Yep, and it always reminds me of how far Apple came with Objective-C. Microsoft and Google continually push new languages on us, and yet Apple developers used Objective-C for over 16 years just fine, and continue to push technology barriers with it. Apple instead chooses to improve supporting tools - XCode, etc.

On the other hand sometimes you have to take a step backward to take 2 steps forward. Sometimes thats a project rewrite, sometimes its a new programming style, new code layout, a new IDE, or a new programming language. A language is just a tool, and picking up a new one shouldn't be hard. Its natural that we tend to migrate to simpler and more productive tools over time.

  > Apple developers used Objective-C for over 16
  > years just fine

The initial release of OS X was March 24, 2001. IIRC, ObjC was not used on MacOS 9. Unless you're talking about the creation of OS X out of NeXT (which Apple purchased in 1996), and therefore Apple employees (not just 3rd-party devs that work on the Apple platform).

Objective-C the language has existed since the 1980s. I remember reading Brad Cox's book "Object Oriented Programming, An Evolutionary Approach" in the early 1990s.

NeXT dates back to the late 1980s so if you're counting that, Objective-C has been used on the OS X lineage for over 20 years.

The original comment was about Apple developers using it for over 16 years. You can't count the NeXT years, as NeXT developers were not Apple employees.

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