FWIW - This is Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang. Definitely an old-school REPL/functional guy, and I love seeing him playing around with swift. Re

FWIW - This is Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang. Definitely an old-school REPL/functional guy, and I love seeing him playing around with swift. Regarding GUIs and IDEs: I think interface builder is the best ever way to build UIs, far more fun and comprehensible than web development. I totally understand why Joe wants to control every line of code and do nothing in Xcode-- when things go wrong in the IDE they can be a pain to deal with. For me, I think there's several common stages of Mac/iOS developer: 1. Newbie- needs Interface builder because GUIs are all so confusing and he doesn't yet know the API. 2. Control Freak -- knows enough (and spent enough time struggling with Interface Builder, because IB isn't a magic box and you do have to know how things are working under the hood, and the Newbie often struggles because of this).. and so he wants to avoid IB and do everything in code so he has absolute control. 3. Starting to see the light-- tired of tiresome pointless repetitive GUI code, back to Interface builder, but this time understanding the underlying parts of it, and having a lot more fun with IB 4. Enlightened-- uses Interface builder for most stuff, but knows when and where to drop down to GUI code and generally only does that in a highly leveraged way. One of the things I find frustrating about web development is there is no interface builder (though some people have attempted to create them in the past, they always seem to abandon them, unfortunately.) So you're always stuck wit the frustration of constantly defining everything by hand-- when the reality is there's nothing that should stop web browsers from being able to handle auto-layout the way that iOS does. Anyway, if you've rejected IB and are finding GUI code a PITA, try using IB in balance.