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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, hig

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.
    - pbh101 8y ago
      One of the headlining features of the latest iOS release was performance.
      - hopler 8y ago
        That's computing's tick tock release pattern in general. Tick new features, tock optimizes performance.
        jekub 8y ago
        Then, how do you explain that the last update improved performance a lot on older devices ? Last time I've checked there was no hardware upgrades in the downloaded update...
        jsjohnst 8y ago
        Where did GP say anything about hardware?
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      > 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. I’m not sure where you’re getting this anecdote from, because I have not found it to be at all true in practice.
      - josephg 8y ago
        I’m not sure about the situation at Apple, but this is 100% true in the web development world today; with the exception that many of the new programmers hired straight out of General Assembly and the like can’t implement a DFS algorithm either. It’s a nightmare for security and performance - the number of obvious, blatant security issues I’ve spotted and fixed just through luck alone is horrifying.

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.
  - pbh101 8y ago
    One of the headlining features of the latest iOS release was performance.
    - hopler 8y ago
      That's computing's tick tock release pattern in general. Tick new features, tock optimizes performance.
      - jekub 8y ago
        Then, how do you explain that the last update improved performance a lot on older devices ? Last time I've checked there was no hardware upgrades in the downloaded update...
        jsjohnst 8y ago
        Where did GP say anything about hardware?
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > 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. I’m not sure where you’re getting this anecdote from, because I have not found it to be at all true in practice.
    - josephg 8y ago
      I’m not sure about the situation at Apple, but this is 100% true in the web development world today; with the exception that many of the new programmers hired straight out of General Assembly and the like can’t implement a DFS algorithm either. It’s a nightmare for security and performance - the number of obvious, blatant security issues I’ve spotted and fixed just through luck alone is horrifying.