[mettamage]

I should've started a year later when ARC was introduced (I started learning between 2011 - 2013).

Learning iOS dev with reference counting as a memory management system was really painful. My programming skill wasn't up to speed yet to "just" learn a new language. I only knew some university Java at the time. And while I did write impressive projects with it, I wasn't strong enough in an algorithmic sense.

Learning a framework and learning memory management, and kind of needing to deal with pointers but not really proved to be too much.

When ARC was introduced it was a breeze.

Now, when I read this whole comment, nowadays I'd think: this is such nonsense. Memory management should not be a barrier to learn iOS dev. But when you're in that weird space of that you kind of know how to program (5000+ lines code) but you really need to get into it, and it doesn't feel natural yet. Then, yea, it does matter a lot.

A few years later I learned C and had no issues learning pointers or memory management. To be fair, I didn't need to use any frameworks with C.