A comment at the bottom of his own lengthy but otherwise interesting article:
One more important point: I’m surprised that some people seem to think I’m implying some programming studliness from my little 3-day excursion. Not so: any first-year college student or intern, or heck, self-taught dude in his basement, could have done exactly what I did.
I failed utterly to convey the right point here, by unfortunately being way too subtle about it. The recounting of total hours spent was a hats-off compliment to Apple for having written such great APIs, documentation, and tools.
Let me be clearer about it, then: Apple’s development environment is nothing short of amazing, which I fully expected, knowing it derived originally from NeXTStep and has had fifteen or twenty years of innovations piled on.
The APIs are clean. This is why I was able to narrow down the APIs I needed so quickly.
The whole thing I got working was no more than 50 lines of code, most of it error-handling. That’s C code, so it’s impressive how much it accomplishes in so little space.
The takeaway here is that more programmers ought to jump in and start playing with OS X. You get results faster than you’d think.