From a novice Objective-C/Cocoa programmer's point of view, automatic garbage collection can't come quickly enough! Though of course there ought to be a manual override to such a system (if elected to be used) on an individual variable basis, which would probably be the exact opposite to the 'autorelease' mechanism that's already in use.
Many 'average programmers' really don't want to be bothered with arcane memory management details; witness the rising popularity of languages such as Ruby, and the benefits of bringing more novice programmers on board will be reflected in an increase in the number of Mac OS applications. Indeed automatic garbage collection may even force more programmers to think in purely object oriented terms (with heavier use of accessor methods) as opposed to generally relying on the use of global variables.
by David — Oct 11
Many 'average programmers' really don't want to be bothered with arcane memory management details; witness the rising popularity of languages such as Ruby, and the benefits of bringing more novice programmers on board will be reflected in an increase in the number of Mac OS applications. Indeed automatic garbage collection may even force more programmers to think in purely object oriented terms (with heavier use of accessor methods) as opposed to generally relying on the use of global variables.