I cannot agree that no garbage collection is a feature. It is just like saying poverty is a feature.
However, Apple might have good reasons taking garbage collection out of iOS. Here is my speculation. From financial and technical point of view, it is not worth to drain their manpower in writing good garbage collector and handling consequent complexity in this device. It gains no better user experience. If garbage collector goes wrong, the user experience is hellish. Everyone will blame Apple instead of application developers.
On the other hand, writing Objective-C code is not particularly hard. The key is to return memory to system as soon as possible. Once adapted to class pattern, coder is easy to manage memory because the memory alloc/release cycle is very structural. Just keep it in designated place. Also, Apple does not inhibit coders to use autorelease. And, XCode have some tools to detect possible memory leaking code.
I have worked on Adobe Flex for years. Flash player has garbage collection. But in fact, an application consumes lots of memory easily but there is no way to control it. Garbage collection is good, but only when there is a good garbage collector.
I am optimistic that some years later, garbage collector will eventually on iOS, as MacOS X now. Mobile processor and battery are expected to be more powerful.
From my experience, Apple does not really care about memory leaking of my application. (Or I never exceed their limit. Or it is hard to distinguish from other consumption.) Apple concerns more on application design and its content.
Average typing speed is enough. Programmers do not look at the keyboard when typing.
Novice speed does hamper efficiency. Finding alphabets, numbers and symbols on keyboard interrupts programmers' thought.
Fast does help much as programmers do not type much one at time but thinks more between lines of code. Usually programmers write a few lines even a few characters for adjustment.
For programmers, good use of editor is more important. Able to use keyword short-cuts to cut and paste, replacing pattern of text, finding text, moving text between files is a key to efficiency.
Every software will be obsoleted eventually. Software will evolve into another piece. But it is long time to go.
Full Standard implemented by vendors takes exceptional long time. It is very frustrating. Developers have to deal with numerous compatibility issues. So it is too early to say either Silverlight or Flash is dead.
Even if there is a mature JavaScript library and framework that comparable to existing Silverlight and Flash. It still takes long time to change. Companies and developers investing heavily on one technology will not adapt new technology very soon, considering that large base of existing software, human talents relies on that technology.
One well-known fact is that nearly every petroleum producer trades petroleum in US dollar. Rumour has it that if some major producers attempt to switch to another currency, she hurts US economy and will be retaliated by US.
Printing more money does not benefit Americans in general. Much of money is taken by US financial firms to overseas for speculation instead of going to manufacturing sector when the devaluation of US dollar is foreseeable. Sudden flux of speculation hurts the economy of other nations.
Hong Kong is a quite different place. It differs from Mainland China. It preserves Chinese traditional values while accepts Western values.
Traditionally, Chinese manages themselves according Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist views. Riches are encouraged to donate in order to secure better later life, reincarnation, lives of offsprings. Sometimes it was rewarded with some good "titles" from mandarin. Communist in Mainland Chines destroyed all the traditions while Hong Kong preserves it.
In Hong Kong, there are many international non-government organisation. Western type of charities can establish in Hong Kong. Some of them extends their charity services into China based in Hong Kong. Charity fund-raising happens all round the years.
That's why I said "Spoken and written are very different beasts in Chinese languages". Yes, I can write some variants that only local people can read. It'd just like an Australian writes some English that other world cannot easily understand. But generally, the written form of English by and large is basically the same.
If one is illiterate and cannot recognise any written word, it is nothing to do with writing system. It is about education.
The news article (xinhaunet) you given is about spoken languages, nothing do with written language.
Yes, they read characters in their native languages, not in any modern Chinese languages. Characters are just symbol with meaning. It pronunciation varies from language to language. It does not matter you say "一" in /jat1/, /yi1/, /qit/, /ichi/, /itsu/, /hitotsu/, /hitotbai/, /hajime/, or /il/ and it basically means one.
Chinese is not lack of characters and words to describe things. There are lots of ways to do that.
- (big) the synonym of 大. 大, 巨, 宏, 偉, 碩, 巨大, 巨大無比, 碩大無朋, 無窮, 無盡, 無崖, 無窮無盡, 無止境, 堂煌, 海量, 寬敞, 不可尺量, 重大. It is overlapped with wide (寬, 闊), deep (深), heavy(重), large quantity (豐).
- (good) the synonym of 好. 好, 佳, 優, 正, 良, 妙, 善, 美. (best) 頂級, 極品, 完美, 完善, 盡善盡美, 美不勝收, 嘆爲觀止, 無宇倫比. You can combine them like 良好, 優良, 妙好. You can describe the extreme with 極, 絕, 最, 頂 like 極佳, 極好, 絕妙, 頂好. In spoken languages, 誇啦啦, 頂呱呱. If you describe a good song, it could be 天籟 or 天籟之音, or 絕唱.
Above are just a few of them. It is too numerous to exhaust the list.
You are misleading. Koreans have their own languages. Only the written form is drastically changed. It is not a new language.
It is more than hard and easy. Remember there is politics and culture. The disuse of Chinese character is pretty recent, post-WWII.
Recently, some Koreans suggest to pick up Chinese character in Korean. In the past, Korean culture and history are written in these characters. After a few generation, only very few people can recognise them properly. Also, Characters differentiate homonym. With characters, it would cause much confusion with numerous homonyms.
You get confused in the Chinese languages system. Spoken and written are very different beasts in Chinese language. The literacy relies on the meaning of characters. It is just like one can understands the meaning "1234" and "+, -" while reading them out loud in their own language. I write "1 + 2" and read it "yat ka yi" when you read "one plus two". It does not hinder the understand of mathematics.
Although there are numerous Chinese languages, the characters are basically the same. Although there are many variants in text, the written language is long unified. They can communicate by text.
In the past, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese can read Chinese text in their own languages. But, you know, they are from different language families.
There ain't too much Chinese characters as one perceives. A Chinese character is like a word in English. They are just using different vehicles to load meaning. For example, the Chinese character 早 is equivalent to "morning" or "early" in English. When you learn to write it, it is the combination of 日 and 十. When Chinese learner struggles for the combination of components, English learner struggles for that of letters(, or stem root). They are pretty the same. It is much easier to remember that 早 (morning) is associated with 日 (sun). Once you master the skill, it is as easy as spelling. You can complain too much characters when comparing the number of words in English.
I like classical Chinese. It is the minimalistic form of Chinese languages. Concise and Poetic.
Modern Chinese is heavily polluted by Western languages, both English and Russian. Modern Chinese text is crippled by Western grammar. This makes the text filled with empty words, and long sentences, and odd construction, mechanical, and confusion.
Writing Chinese never emphases grammar, but the sequence and context. It is dramatically different approach from Indo-European languages. For example, In English "When the rain falls, there are fewer and fewer people on the street." Alternative, you can write, "there are fewer and fewer people on the street when the rain falls." The order of words and phrases is not so important. In Chinese, it can be "天雨，街上人漸疏"(sky rain => on street people fewer), or more concisely, 雨下人疏(rain fall => people fewer), or 天雨人疏(sky rain => people fewer). You can't reverse the word order in Chinese. You can forget grammar completely but write the consequence of your thought and scene. It is what the idiomatic phrase from. For example, if you describe a person fails to break up a relationship, you can say 欲斷難斷 (want to break => (but) hard to break). This saves lots of words.
However, Apple might have good reasons taking garbage collection out of iOS. Here is my speculation. From financial and technical point of view, it is not worth to drain their manpower in writing good garbage collector and handling consequent complexity in this device. It gains no better user experience. If garbage collector goes wrong, the user experience is hellish. Everyone will blame Apple instead of application developers.
On the other hand, writing Objective-C code is not particularly hard. The key is to return memory to system as soon as possible. Once adapted to class pattern, coder is easy to manage memory because the memory alloc/release cycle is very structural. Just keep it in designated place. Also, Apple does not inhibit coders to use autorelease. And, XCode have some tools to detect possible memory leaking code.
I have worked on Adobe Flex for years. Flash player has garbage collection. But in fact, an application consumes lots of memory easily but there is no way to control it. Garbage collection is good, but only when there is a good garbage collector.
I am optimistic that some years later, garbage collector will eventually on iOS, as MacOS X now. Mobile processor and battery are expected to be more powerful.
From my experience, Apple does not really care about memory leaking of my application. (Or I never exceed their limit. Or it is hard to distinguish from other consumption.) Apple concerns more on application design and its content.