alt Hacker News7 Years of release on Swift UI, 12 years for Swift.
This isn't 7 years of development, but 7 - 12 years after release. And to most these past 7 - 12 years are an ongoing beta development. It is unfinished, unpolished with no end in sight. And I have been extremely critical since the beginning.
But the problem runs much much deeper. It isn't the technology that is the problem, not the devs who are making it. It is the person making the decision as to WHY this was allowed from the get go. WHY this was allowed to be released, or even before all that WHY resources for development of these ideas were allowed in the first place.
For every yes that are a thousand no. Instead a lot of Apple's software development can be summarised as resume or KPI bonus driven development. It is not as bad as Google and Microsoft, but it is clear Apple have this problem a well.
If you look back into Jobs era of Apple software, ( and not just software ) Apple manage to have done most things 2x better with half the resources. The whole Apple now is bloated. And yet everyone is chanting Craig Federighi all the way.
And it is funny because for the vast majority of these 7-12 years I was the only few on HN and Twitter that was extremely skeptical of it, to the point I gave up writing ( or ranting ) about it before majority Swift and Swift UI developers negative sentiment emerged.
And I have often asked the same question every single time, what if they just spend one fifth of the resources to iterate and improve C / Objective-C and Cocoa. All the resources on Swift and everything adjacent to it could have been better spent somewhere else.
I have high hope for John Ternus, hopefully he gets his political game right and manage to change course for Apple software somewhere down the line.
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I left Swift and SwiftUi behind be 5 years ago when I switched jobs. I had fond memories and always eyed going back.
What were the emerging problems that you talk about? I am actually curious because I was quite fond of the DevEx
I agree with you. Swift should have been a modernized Objective-C. It should have kept the best parts of it, which made it a joy to use, and leave the archaic and the weird things behind.
it would have been a great language, meanwhile they decided to throw everything out and created a language that it is overcomplex, and it is failing to gain any traction outside iOS / Apple's ecosystem. Basically, if you weren't required to use it, nobody would, which makes it a failure.
SwiftUI, should have been a rendering template/library integrated with UIKit. Also, cleaning up some of the UIKit syntanx and framework (simplifying it), and use SwiftUI as a template for UI, would have been ideal.
SwiftUI instead was pitched as replacement, yet it is not near as capable as UIKit, and it is not feature parity even 7 years later.
Just bad leadership by Apple in this case. (probably many of these decissions were 'promo / resume padding driven' as it happens in many large companies).
> Instead a lot of Apple's software development can be summarised as resume or KPI bonus driven development. It is not as bad as Google and Microsoft, but it is clear Apple have this problem a well.
When did the term “KPI” come into use at Apple? I’m aware it was used in management circles decades ago but I don’t remember it being so common say in 2005. The underlying concept is sound, but the problem with abstracting it under an acronym is that it treats KPIs as somewhat fungible regardless of importance. It’s like “lines of code” as a productivity measure all over again.