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arriving at a learning plateau
Monday, February 23 2009
If you've been paying attention you know that during this dry period in the web development business I've been teaching myself how to program the iPhone. It hasn't been easy; just yesterday I ran into a wall where I couldn't access an array produced by the componentsSeparatedByString method. It turned out that this array was was an NSArray, and thus an array of objects and unreachable through the standard C-language array access technique, name_of_array[index]. Instead I had to use the objectAtIndex method, something that none of the documentation for componentsSeparatedByString had made clear. These are the stumbling blocks that make learning a new programming language discouraging, even when you're conversant in five or six other computer languages.
But today things really started coming together. It felt like I had come to the top of a steep learning slope (one underlain, no doubt, by a crumbling bedrock of shale) and reached a blessed learning plateau (one underlain by a bedrock of bluestone). I'm sworn to secrecy about the nature of the iPhone application I have written. It's not complicated, but the fact that it works so responsively and without any crashes is more gratifying than I'd expected it to be.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090223 feedback
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