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Apple's application programming has fallen off a cliff in the last 4 years. I blame Swift. There's nothing wrong with the language itself, but its outward simil

Apple's application programming has fallen off a cliff in the last 4 years. I blame Swift. There's nothing wrong with the language itself, but its outward similarities to.... other dynamic languages I feel has led to a rot in the core of what was once a rock solid culture of embedded C/C++/Objective-C programmers building robust, well architected applications. The average Apple app today is just as buggy and disjointed as anything else on the App Store, and that never used to be the case.

maxerickson 8y ago
You need to integrate the famous iTunes into this thesis. (people have complained about it approximately since it was released)
- peteretep 8y ago
  iTunes has always felt robust and well-architected, but it's UI has been a dumpster fire since whenever.
  - audiometry 8y ago
    No way. I regularly have problems with it hanging or just ceasing to respond to “play” command. Ana this in on OS X, not windows.
  - Gigablah 8y ago
    "This app is preventing shutdown". Yep, it's always iTunes.
- aphextron 8y ago
  >You need to integrate the famous iTunes into this thesis. Desktop iTunes is a dumpster fire, but their iOS software is what I was specifically referring to.
  - jimmaswell 8y ago
    I actually liked some of the versions of iTunes for Windows back when I had to use it with an iPod Touch around 2008 to 2012 or so. For just playing music from my music library, the interface wasn't bad. You just had to turn off the option to automatically convert everything into Apple's format.
- ImprovedSilence 8y ago
  >> people have complained about it approximately since it was released and I ain't gonna stop complaining until I find a suitable music player to replace it!
zozbot123 8y ago
What? Objective C is a lot more dynamic than Swift - which was the whole point of making a new language, albeit Swift itself is not quite as well-developed, highly-performing or safe as, e.g. Rust. I think it's programming practices themselves that have fallen off a cliff, at least in the non-FLOSS world, and nothing specific to Apple. You can even see this in the dumpster-fire that's popularly known as "Windows 10", as well as in the latest versions of Mac OS X which are a lot slower and less user-friendly than their predecessors.
- aphextron 8y ago
  >What? Objective C is a lot more dynamic than Swift Sure, that could be argued. But with Objective-C, you still had exposure to the "metal". You had to understand what a pointer is, and why you would want to use it. You had to understand memory management, even though ARC does the job (mostly). It was firmly entrenched in the world of memory efficient embedded programming that mobile started out as, but now that developers coming from Javascript/Python land see a familiar syntax they've brought their patterns with them as well.
  - MBCook 8y ago
    So… your theory is that if people understood pointers this wouldn’t have happened? I don’t think that follows.
    - aphextron 8y ago
      >So… your theory is that if people understood pointers this wouldn’t have happened? Yes. But it has nothing to do with pointers specifically, just the mindset and training of the average developer who has had experience with them, vs. the average developer who has not. There's an entire generation of developers now graduating from CS programs, hiring into Apple, and getting dumped on these application teams with zero real world experience and their only language being Python or Swift. The result is you have tons of brilliant people who can quickly whip up a DFS algorithm, but don't understand that using 4MB of RAM for a JPEG is unnacceptable, or that whatever dynamic thing they are asking the runtime to do might not always work as intended. That's why we get these massive feature lists nobody asked for with every iOS release, and zero emphasis on performance.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
saagarjha 8y ago
Most of iOS is still written using Objective-C, including FaceTime. Swift has nothing to do with this.
- aphextron 8y ago
  >Most of iOS is still written using Objective-C, including FaceTime. Swift has nothing to do with this. Most of iOS is still great. The problem is all the cruft that has developed since around 7.0. It just seems like an endless march of features at all expense.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    Swift came out along iOS 8, just FYI. Is there some other cruft you're talking about?

maxerickson 8y ago

You need to integrate the famous iTunes into this thesis. (people have complained about it approximately since it was released)

peteretep 8y ago
iTunes has always felt robust and well-architected, but it's UI has been a dumpster fire since whenever.
- audiometry 8y ago
  No way. I regularly have problems with it hanging or just ceasing to respond to “play” command. Ana this in on OS X, not windows.
- Gigablah 8y ago
  "This app is preventing shutdown". Yep, it's always iTunes.
aphextron 8y ago
>You need to integrate the famous iTunes into this thesis. Desktop iTunes is a dumpster fire, but their iOS software is what I was specifically referring to.
- jimmaswell 8y ago
  I actually liked some of the versions of iTunes for Windows back when I had to use it with an iPod Touch around 2008 to 2012 or so. For just playing music from my music library, the interface wasn't bad. You just had to turn off the option to automatically convert everything into Apple's format.
ImprovedSilence 8y ago
>> people have complained about it approximately since it was released and I ain't gonna stop complaining until I find a suitable music player to replace it!

zozbot123 8y ago

What? Objective C is a lot more dynamic than Swift - which was the whole point of making a new language, albeit Swift itself is not quite as well-developed, highly-performing or safe as, e.g. Rust. I think it's programming practices themselves that have fallen off a cliff, at least in the non-FLOSS world, and nothing specific to Apple. You can even see this in the dumpster-fire that's popularly known as "Windows 10", as well as in the latest versions of Mac OS X which are a lot slower and less user-friendly than their predecessors.

aphextron 8y ago
>What? Objective C is a lot more dynamic than Swift Sure, that could be argued. But with Objective-C, you still had exposure to the "metal". You had to understand what a pointer is, and why you would want to use it. You had to understand memory management, even though ARC does the job (mostly). It was firmly entrenched in the world of memory efficient embedded programming that mobile started out as, but now that developers coming from Javascript/Python land see a familiar syntax they've brought their patterns with them as well.
- MBCook 8y ago
  So… your theory is that if people understood pointers this wouldn’t have happened? I don’t think that follows.
  - aphextron 8y ago
    >So… your theory is that if people understood pointers this wouldn’t have happened? Yes. But it has nothing to do with pointers specifically, just the mindset and training of the average developer who has had experience with them, vs. the average developer who has not. There's an entire generation of developers now graduating from CS programs, hiring into Apple, and getting dumped on these application teams with zero real world experience and their only language being Python or Swift. The result is you have tons of brilliant people who can quickly whip up a DFS algorithm, but don't understand that using 4MB of RAM for a JPEG is unnacceptable, or that whatever dynamic thing they are asking the runtime to do might not always work as intended. That's why we get these massive feature lists nobody asked for with every iOS release, and zero emphasis on performance.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

saagarjha 8y ago

Most of iOS is still written using Objective-C, including FaceTime. Swift has nothing to do with this.

aphextron 8y ago
>Most of iOS is still written using Objective-C, including FaceTime. Swift has nothing to do with this. Most of iOS is still great. The problem is all the cruft that has developed since around 7.0. It just seems like an endless march of features at all expense.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Swift came out along iOS 8, just FYI. Is there some other cruft you're talking about?