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All the junior mobile engineers I’m interviewing now are learning iOS development on Swift. Junior engineers are probably the most pragmatic programmers on the

by madrox 9y ago

All the junior mobile engineers I’m interviewing now are learning iOS development on Swift. Junior engineers are probably the most pragmatic programmers on the planet. When they’re choosing to learn Swift vs ObjC, none of them are saying “...but ABI stability!” They’re learning Swift because they’ve found they can make apps faster with it. Tells you all you need to know about the future right there.

madrox 9y ago
That said, I should follow up by saying...we recently did an assessment and determined it wasn’t yet worth the time to refactor our ObjC apps into Swift apps. We’ll probably wait for Swift 5 and reevaluate.
danso 9y ago
That seems like a narrow definition of "pragmatic". Are they choosing Swift out of experience, or from lack of it? If they are junior engineers, how much experience have they had in building, and then iterating and maintaining apps with a significant userbase?
microtherion 9y ago
> Junior engineers are probably the most pragmatic programmers on the planet As a cranky senior engineer (and Swift fan), I'd say that junior engineers tend to overvalue novelty and undervalue stability.
- xeromal 9y ago
  As a dev forced into web development, you're not kidding. Frameworks and tooling are a dime a dozen. I learn this and in 6 weeks it's old and busted and not cool. You can't really become an expert at anything, but plain old javascript.
  - dozzie 9y ago
    >> As a cranky senior engineer (and Swift fan), > As a dev forced into web development, you're not kidding. But he's not web programmer, he's mobile programmer.
yxhuvud 9y ago
Yes, it tells me juniors still don't have any experience maintaining systems. And that in turn tells me I won't be out of work any time soon.
agildehaus 9y ago
Or, you know, it's an objectively better language, clearly the future of the platform, and ABI stability doesn't usually affect the day-to-day life of an iOS developer.
CodeWriter23 9y ago
How does one “make apps faster with it” when the compiler takes 3x as long?
- pjmlp 9y ago
  You don't spend days tracking down memory corruption issues caused by C underpinnings.
  - charlesdm 9y ago
    Not bashing Swift, but I can't remember the last time I had a memory issue when using ARC in ObjC.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      ARC in Objective-C only applies to classes following Cocoa retain/release patterns. Anything else is not under ARC support and thus fails under the same memory allocation patterns as C. Additionally there are the C pointer manipulation, strings and arrays.

by madrox 9y ago

madrox 9y ago

That said, I should follow up by saying...we recently did an assessment and determined it wasn’t yet worth the time to refactor our ObjC apps into Swift apps. We’ll probably wait for Swift 5 and reevaluate.

danso 9y ago

That seems like a narrow definition of "pragmatic". Are they choosing Swift out of experience, or from lack of it? If they are junior engineers, how much experience have they had in building, and then iterating and maintaining apps with a significant userbase?

microtherion 9y ago

> Junior engineers are probably the most pragmatic programmers on the planet As a cranky senior engineer (and Swift fan), I'd say that junior engineers tend to overvalue novelty and undervalue stability.

xeromal 9y ago
As a dev forced into web development, you're not kidding. Frameworks and tooling are a dime a dozen. I learn this and in 6 weeks it's old and busted and not cool. You can't really become an expert at anything, but plain old javascript.
- dozzie 9y ago
  >> As a cranky senior engineer (and Swift fan), > As a dev forced into web development, you're not kidding. But he's not web programmer, he's mobile programmer.

yxhuvud 9y ago

Yes, it tells me juniors still don't have any experience maintaining systems. And that in turn tells me I won't be out of work any time soon.

agildehaus 9y ago

Or, you know, it's an objectively better language, clearly the future of the platform, and ABI stability doesn't usually affect the day-to-day life of an iOS developer.

CodeWriter23 9y ago

How does one “make apps faster with it” when the compiler takes 3x as long?

pjmlp 9y ago
You don't spend days tracking down memory corruption issues caused by C underpinnings.
- charlesdm 9y ago
  Not bashing Swift, but I can't remember the last time I had a memory issue when using ARC in ObjC.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    ARC in Objective-C only applies to classes following Cocoa retain/release patterns. Anything else is not under ARC support and thus fails under the same memory allocation patterns as C. Additionally there are the C pointer manipulation, strings and arrays.