Knowledge is an endless infinite-leveled mountain. Each step, giant or small, you take towards the top is expanding your skyline, which is great. But those same steps seems to make the tip of the mountain higher. Looks like Uncle Socrates was right, and that the luckiest (or wisest) of us can only know that one thing.
The crowning touch: when you go back to the lowest level and explain to others how great it is to come up, you are nothing but a jerk (or maybe it’s just me).
Another thing we get from Apple philosophy: we must be useful to the users. Sounds like a lapalissade, isn’t it ? But for experienced programmers, it’s easy to see how easy it is to fall into feature traps. “Of course my weather app checking the stocks and the amazon sales is logical”. Apple’s limits and rigourousness may be a burden to the programmes, but it’s a gift for the (final) user.
I have been succint about the joy we, iOS developers, get from programming on “our” platform. I’ll try to be even shorter this time. Where does this proudness come from ? Simple: elegancy. Once again, I don’t know much about other platforms (I should) but I can tell that Apple, with all its limitation, is giving us one of the best operating system and the according framework.
There’s a thing that stroke me more than anything else from the WWDC 2011: we, as iOS programmers, are golden cogs. Our programming skills are the cogs and Apple gives us the gold glaze. Call me a boaster but I’m proud to be an iOS programmer. Part because I’ve been using Macs since I’m 6, part because it’s the most elegant OS right now.
Ok, I don’t know every single OS and each one of you thinks “his” OS is the best (you know, mum and her baby…). Hey, let’s say learning WP7 (yeah, you read it right: WP7, not Android) will be on my todo list for the end of 2011.
But the point is this single sentence: Apple is making iOS developpers proud and happy to make iOS apps. From that, you can expect quality self-requirement that will blast through the top.
And that is priceless