[pphysch]

This comes off a bit as "knows how to produce a product on a particular platform (iOS, with Swift via XCode), doesn't demonstrate the theory or fundamentals". Talking about "retain cycles" from an iOS perspective with no mention of "memory leak" or "reference counting" or "garbage collection", which are more widely-applicable terms.

I don't think going wholly to the other end of the theory-praxis spectrum is the answer in addressing the gap :-)

There is a good main thrust here but requires a lot of work/editing to be really useful IMO.

[exdsq]

I had very little idea what retain cycles were - what a weird term (to an outsider)! I thought it was related to using a variable for looping or something.

[hyko]

Yeah, the disconnect is that the title and intro talk in general terms, but the actual advice is about a specific platform.

[stinos]

Agreed; it's not bad what the OP explains, though indeed a bit platform-restricted, but with a title like that I expected more of the architectural points/standard good practices/design principles/... to pass by. While those will not always have a direct link to making your software usable from the user's point of view, they do (imo) matter a lot. Also for making it usable for the developer, and maintainable (i.e. still usable in the future).

[posedge]

I was wondering what "retain cycles" are

[yassinerajallah]

Valid point you got there, I'll take it into consideration in my next articles. I just started blogging 3 days ago and never expected this would blow up. Thanks for the advice again !