[flyosity]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but how much effort are you talking about here? Skipping @synthesize on properties or using literal syntax where/when it makes sense wouldn't cause much additional cognitive load and you don't have to convert old code to use the new sugar.

[demallien]

It's not as simple as that when you're planning for the long term. Firstly you need to examine the changes and make sure that they aren't going to create any compatability problems, of the type "if you activate this option, then you can no longer link to libraries that don't use this option". Garbage collection in particular had a lot of those sorts of problems.

But even if you can convince yourself that it is just syntactic sugar, you have to have a long hard think about whether or not you are going to adopt the style. Adopting means going back and changing the code you have already written. Not adopting the style is not tenable in the long term - the new syntax is clearly superior to the old syntax, so there will be a lot of pressure to code the new way. This is particularly true when playing in Apple's backyard, as they have a habit of taking a nice new technology that is optional in one release, and then building on that optional feature for a next release.

For me, in this one particular case, I'll probably go with the new syntax, going back through modules that are already written and redoing them with the new syntax each time I have to touch one for a bug fix/feature.

I'm just getting frustrated because my project started about 18 months ago - I work on it nights and weekends, and I have to keep stopping work on the project and spending time adapting to new tools. The last 18 months or so have been particularly tumultuous. XCode 4 was a big change compared to its predecessors. I started using the garbage collector just to have it more or less replaced by ARC.

None of this is insurmountable, but as a one person, part-time shop with a fairly ambitious project, this is really starting to become painful for me, which is the point I was trying to get across, and I suspect that I'm not the only one to be feeling the pain. Perhaps I would feel better about deciding not to follow Apple on this one if I could be sure that that decision wouldn't mean me finding myself with a big code base on my hands that is unable to take advantage of the new hotness in the next version of Objective-C because I decided to skip this version's changes...

[pooriaazimi]

I understand what you mean; but in this case, I think it's fairly easy to adopt new syntax in all of you code base. Just search for NSArray arrayWithObjects:, NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjects: and NSNumber numberWithChar: and replace them with new syntax. It wouldn't be this easy if it was a major change (like ARC).

[mikeash]

This particular change takes about fifteen minutes to fully understand. Adopting does not require changing any existing code. I can kind of see where you're coming from in general, but attaching the complaint to this feature makes no sense to me. This stuff is pretty much pure win and no effort.

[pjmlp]

Why should you rewrite working code?