[e28eta]

You have a lot of comments on this article, with some good questions and good points. However, I think there's a theme in some of them:

> Well-disciplined iOS developers can keep this under control.

Well-disciplined iOS developers with good development practices were also able to manage manual reference counting. However, I think it's widely agreed that ARC was a step forward for iOS development. Similarly, the Swift language has eliminated whole classes of bugs - ones that expert developers didn't often struggle with but nevertheless were problematic for the platform as a whole.

Personally, I love developing for iOS. I don't think there's anything broken with Apple's frameworks. I tend to be conservative and would prefer to rely on first-party provided frameworks & libraries when writing an application, with judicious use of 2nd & 3rd party code.

However, I believe there will be a better way to write iOS apps in the future. I think there's a lot of accidental complexity involved that must be simplified eventually. I don't think Katana is the solution. But I'm very curious to find out if it's a step in the right direction.

[rezashirazian]

Comparing referencing counting and following a disciplined convention in coding are not the same thing. ARC was a step forward because it eliminated a nuisance inconvenience from your development which most of the time was not related to the problem you were solving.

Following a good and disciplined programing convention is more of an overarching theme of how you solve your problems. It practically defines your style and no amount of forced framework convention will be a step forward unless you're willing to take it.