> Apple did still have a marketing problem courting outside developers Apple categorically did not have a problem courting outside developers at this point in

> Apple did still have a marketing problem courting outside developers Apple categorically did not have a problem courting outside developers at this point in time. They hit 20m registered developers in 2018: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/app-store-hits-20m-registered-developers-at-100b-in-revenues-500m-visitors-per-week/?guccounter=1 https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/app-store-hits-20m-registe... Yes, this was after the Swift announcement, but the trajectory was in place way before that. WWDC has been completely sold out for how many years? At first, it sold out in a couple of weeks, then a couple of days, then a couple of hours and finally a couple of minutes or even seconds. Then they started doing the lottery and even that was a while ago. > but that inherently means ditching some very familiar syntax Swift has tons of unfamiliar syntax. And you don't have to adopt Smalltalk as-is. Objective-Smalltalk, for example, has class definition syntax and uses curly braces. Those are not big deals. Keyword syntax, on the other hand, is a big deal, as the example of Swift shows. Because you do want argument labels, and you do want to pass closures. But that just gets messier and messier.