Learning about C hacks and realizing the extent of the effort put into making Swift...not be like that.
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Also realizing exactly why Objective-C is...the way it is
The answer as to "Why would do that to yourself?" is, it was for a class, and programmers of a certain age just assume you know C.
I tried learning Objective-C after doing Swift and a little web dev with languages like JS and Python. I should have introduced myself to C basics first, because all the weird shit Objective-C does makes sense once you know the problems you can run into writing C code.
Imagine trying to work with Objective-C when you don't know what a header file is or why you need one.
That was me trying to translate Objective-C into Swift.