Symbian Programming horror

Lot of my colleagues ask me "why is symbian so tough to understand and program?"

well symbian programming is not that tough but its not that easy either. Symbain's EVP David Woods in a book written by him titled "Symbian for Software Leaders" talks about a document he wrote during the early days of Symbian, During the developement of EPOC.

The document "Goals for a ERA software development" spoke about some of the points programmers should keep in mind while developing an ERA* software.The one which caught my attention and which influendced me to write a blogpost was this particular point from that doc...

7. Simplicity of interface

To prevent the programming interface becoming too large and
unwieldy, it shouldn’t offer programmers too many equivalent ways of achieving the same end. The interface should be ‘‘complete’’ but not‘‘more than complete’’. There’s no need to hand-hold the programmer,who can be assumed to be already proficient in all aspects of C++.

Now i know a better and a smart answer to the age old symbian question :)

Note: to know more about the ERA development goals read This book available at Amazon.

* ERA - EPOC RISC Architecture