Irrational Exuberance

You are writing a comment about Finally Waving The White Flag to Objective-C 2.0, here is a quick summary:

I've been fighting a very private moral war against Objective-C 2.0 ever since it was released, but I've finally given in and as of a couple weeks ago all my new projects are being written with all the new syntactic sugar. This post looks at the small shoves that finally got me over the edge.

You are responding to this comment written by Will Larson on December 5th 2008, 10:50.

A bit more seriously, do you actually stop and think about passing by value versus passing by reference when you write code? I can't imagine anyone who would treat pointers with such reverence for more than a week or two as they first deal with a language that makes the distinction clear.

If I had consistently referenced ints as pointers, instead of just once, I would agree that it it would be terrifying to read my advice and writings. Instead, something like value/reference isn't something that I even think about when coding, I just do it. The same goes for other basic conceptual level task like picking between map/reduce/for/while or whether to use a simple C array or an NSArray.

If you're making a conscious-level decision whether or not to use a pointer, then you're either new to the pointer concept, or doing something wrong. Viewing a misplaced pointer as something more dire than a typo in for-loop syntax is buying into the pointers are hard mindset, and I just don't buy it.

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