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Comment on The subjective experience of coding in different programming languages (2023)

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I'd have to think more about the synesthetic experience, but I'll never forget that my fingers hurt when I wrote Objective-C. I could never locate what the source was; I could have been pressing harder on the keyboard, or I could have been holding tension in my hands. But the language quite literally felt different in a very real, physical way.

edit: it could also have just been me typing with more frustration due to XCode :p

I loved working in XCode at the time, it just "felt" better, it made obj-c "feel" good even though it's a very old language; the navigation, the colour scheme (I think I used the midnight theme), using gestures to do a swipe history back, the integrated tools, side-by-side views, etc, nothing like it.

I tried it again last year or so though, trying out the newer tools like SwiftUI and its live preview, and didn't enjoy it; the stability and performance was just all over the place.

Great observation. Definitely something about those square brackets which puts my right hand in tension

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