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I must have a different idea of what “deep dive” means; this is simply going through the (relatively simple) motions of implementing a builder. “Deep dive”, to

I must have a different idea of what “deep dive” means; this is simply going through the (relatively simple) motions of implementing a builder. “Deep dive”, to me, would look at how the compiler translates statements using these builders, for example, or reverse-engineering Apple’s builders for juicy information. I’ve recently forayed into SwiftUI to see what all the fuss was. I have to say, I really feel for people just now starting to learn app development. Older Cocoa and iOS developers probably remember what actual in-depth articles look like, what “deep dives” actually are, etc. Instead, what we have is a culture of very shallow and information-light “articles”, that seems to me more like SEO bot posts trolling for clicks, rather than written for developers, by developers. And it’s not like the Sundells and Hudsons, but also NSHipster, CocoaWithLove, etc., which were traditionally where high-quality and information-rich content would come from in the past. Likewise with conferences, whereas in the past they’d invite developers to “deep dive” into and interesting development or debugging session, now they’ve devolved, for the most part, into these shallow, byte-sized “Swift” nonsenses. As if the language somehow defines the identity of the developers, and apps magically become much better as virtue of the language used, rather than the system frameworks. I’m getting old.

heavyset_go 6y ago
> I’m getting old. I think you hit the nail on the head with this observation: > Instead, what we have is a culture of very shallow and information-light “articles”, that seems to me more like SEO bot posts trolling for clicks, rather than written for developers, by developers. For a while now, content's been created as a means to improve SEO, and it's really obvious when an article was written just so it contains the right mashup of keywords and that it's padded to just the right length.
Benjammer 6y ago
Two reasons for these shallow, high-level-walk-through type of articles that I've seen are to pad a resume or to pad a promotion packet.
- LeoNatan25 6y ago
  Sure, this is a problem in general when companies require or “heavily encourage” its engineering to post “blogs”. And some developers are just not writers, or lack the skill to do proper articles. But, here, this is not the case; the author makes their living from this. With the former engineers, that’s excusable. Here, less so.
tsycho 6y ago
The funny part is that Sundell and Hacking With Swift are actually among the more useful sites, offering bite sized information that you would expect Apple documentation to provide. But Apple's documentation nowadays, is so bad (inconsistently so, some parts are fine) that these sites are filling the gap. Further, for most other languages, Stack Overflow fits this need mostly fine. But Swift and SwiftUI have been changed so often that the accepted answer on Stack Overflow becomes outdated within a year.
adamnemecek 6y ago
> As if the language somehow defines the identity of the developers, and apps magically become much better as virtue of the language used, rather than the system frameworks. Language matters just as much as the frameworks.
Austin_Conlon 6y ago
I'm surprised to see NSHipster included in your criticism, can you elaborate or point to some articles for comparison?
- LeoNatan25 6y ago
  NSHipster was about taking a piece of obscure framework and deconstructing in as much detail as possible. Now it’s about “DSL”s, Swift, Swift, Swift and some more Swift.
Austin_Conlon 6y ago
One YouTube channel that I think deserves more recognition for in-depth content is AppleProgramming. Here's a video from him on reverse engineering Cocoa controls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTCKXTPUeqY&list=PLgTh9sDnKCUM9cgjfwIkJCSMkUGYmjB6-&index=8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTCKXTPUeqY&list=PLgTh9sDnKC....
luigi23 6y ago
I feel you, but the ‘deep dive’ that you mentioned is not a reserved phrase onlh for super detailed, reverse-engineering articles. Nowadays it’s more and more difficult to find them since writing such article takes 10x of the time compared to standard one, and audience won’t grow, or even shrink(due to complexity and non practicality). I really like them though, especially when they’re written on some niche jekyll blog with atrocious layout - you can feel that it’s been written by a passionate.
chmaynard 6y ago
There are some great examples of this type of in-depth analysis in Mike Ash's blog: https://mikeash.com/pyblog/ https://mikeash.com/pyblog/
- LeoNatan25 6y ago
  Yes! But where is he today? Working at Apple, barred from posting on the blog.
  - chmaynard 6y ago
    What evidence do you have that he left Plausible Labs to work for Apple? If true, that could explain why his blog has been inactive.
    - mayoff 6y ago
      https://twitter.com/mikeash/status/943890969879023618?lang=en https://twitter.com/mikeash/status/943890969879023618?lang=e... > mikeash @mikeash · Dec 21, 2017 > Huge news! I’ll be joining Apple in January to work on the ObjC and Swift runtimes. It’s an amazing chance to work on stuff I’ve tinkered with for years. Friday Q&A will continue, although it might be a bit slower while I get into the swing of things.
      - chmaynard 6y ago
        Hey Mike, it's time to write another blog post about some of the cool stuff you've been working on at Apple. Swift is open source so confidentiality shouldn't be a problem -- right?
auggierose 6y ago
It's not that bad, I've stumbled across that particular article just 1 or 2 weeks ago because I wanted to check what kind of functionality of function builders I can use now for my DSL. It's probably more illuminating though to just try out for yourself... For example, while the article mentions "if let", does that mean "let" also works now? And yes, I wish Apple had proper and up-to-date information on this somewhere.
Grustaf 6y ago
There is a lot of deep material on SwiftUI, for example https:// https:// swiftwithmajid.com and https://swiftui-lab.com https://swiftui-lab.com. The latest edition of the excellent Stanford course also uses SwiftUI, and the tutorials by Apple are great.
- LeoNatan25 6y ago
  That’s not “deep”. That’s just following the motions to accomplish basic tasks.
transfire 6y ago
> I'm getting old And wiser. Youth is wasted on the young. Unfortunately for the field of software development that means endless gyrations of over engineering and technobabel.
patriotapclypse 6y ago
If you want actual in-depth articles, SwiftRocks has some good ones. For example: https://swiftrocks.com/how-never-works-internally-in-swift https://swiftrocks.com/how-never-works-internally-in-swift I also share this opinion. This hard-on that companies have of making coding easy for everyone will be the field's downfall. Just look how people are outraged whenever algorithm's are mentioned in interviews. I lost track of how many people with "senior" positions coming to interview at my company and showing that they know absolutely nothing about anything. My explanation for this is that you have a bunch of people from other areas coming to tech simply because it's easy money. They don't care about becoming the next legendary developer or something like that, they just wanna make easy money. The result is that everything gets dumbed down as a result. I really hate this and it probably means that a lot of important knowledge will be lost when the old dogs die.
- LeoNatan25 6y ago
  That was a good article, thank you! Exactly what I expected from this “deep dive”.
swiley 6y ago
I think part of the issue is that there are fewer and fewer people who are both apple enthusiasts and have been apple developers for a long time. Up until snow leopard lots of very old APIs had been kept around so actually pulling things apart was not only an interesting thing to do but even profitable (because the knowledge gained would be useful for years.) Contrast Apple's current generation of operating systems where the API churn is comparable to lots of JS frameworks. Not to mention how unfriendly the company has been to smaller developers
jdmoreira 6y ago
I'm not disagreeing with you but I want to come here in defence of John Sundell as an excellent Swift programmer that is releasing amazing open source code. I don't consume his content (neither his website nor his podcast) but he sure knows his Swift. His recent code is probably some of the best Swift code I've seen and I have very high standards for that. He creates amazing DSLs / abstractions / APIs by leveraging the type system which in my opinion is exactly what Swift should be about.

heavyset_go 6y ago

> I’m getting old. I think you hit the nail on the head with this observation: > Instead, what we have is a culture of very shallow and information-light “articles”, that seems to me more like SEO bot posts trolling for clicks, rather than written for developers, by developers. For a while now, content's been created as a means to improve SEO, and it's really obvious when an article was written just so it contains the right mashup of keywords and that it's padded to just the right length.

Benjammer 6y ago

Two reasons for these shallow, high-level-walk-through type of articles that I've seen are to pad a resume or to pad a promotion packet.

LeoNatan25 6y ago
Sure, this is a problem in general when companies require or “heavily encourage” its engineering to post “blogs”. And some developers are just not writers, or lack the skill to do proper articles. But, here, this is not the case; the author makes their living from this. With the former engineers, that’s excusable. Here, less so.

tsycho 6y ago

The funny part is that Sundell and Hacking With Swift are actually among the more useful sites, offering bite sized information that you would expect Apple documentation to provide. But Apple's documentation nowadays, is so bad (inconsistently so, some parts are fine) that these sites are filling the gap. Further, for most other languages, Stack Overflow fits this need mostly fine. But Swift and SwiftUI have been changed so often that the accepted answer on Stack Overflow becomes outdated within a year.

adamnemecek 6y ago

> As if the language somehow defines the identity of the developers, and apps magically become much better as virtue of the language used, rather than the system frameworks. Language matters just as much as the frameworks.

Austin_Conlon 6y ago

I'm surprised to see NSHipster included in your criticism, can you elaborate or point to some articles for comparison?

LeoNatan25 6y ago
NSHipster was about taking a piece of obscure framework and deconstructing in as much detail as possible. Now it’s about “DSL”s, Swift, Swift, Swift and some more Swift.

Austin_Conlon 6y ago

One YouTube channel that I think deserves more recognition for in-depth content is AppleProgramming. Here's a video from him on reverse engineering Cocoa controls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTCKXTPUeqY&list=PLgTh9sDnKCUM9cgjfwIkJCSMkUGYmjB6-&index=8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTCKXTPUeqY&list=PLgTh9sDnKC....

luigi23 6y ago

I feel you, but the ‘deep dive’ that you mentioned is not a reserved phrase onlh for super detailed, reverse-engineering articles. Nowadays it’s more and more difficult to find them since writing such article takes 10x of the time compared to standard one, and audience won’t grow, or even shrink(due to complexity and non practicality). I really like them though, especially when they’re written on some niche jekyll blog with atrocious layout - you can feel that it’s been written by a passionate.

chmaynard 6y ago

There are some great examples of this type of in-depth analysis in Mike Ash's blog: https://mikeash.com/pyblog/ https://mikeash.com/pyblog/

LeoNatan25 6y ago
Yes! But where is he today? Working at Apple, barred from posting on the blog.
- chmaynard 6y ago
  What evidence do you have that he left Plausible Labs to work for Apple? If true, that could explain why his blog has been inactive.
  - mayoff 6y ago
    https://twitter.com/mikeash/status/943890969879023618?lang=en https://twitter.com/mikeash/status/943890969879023618?lang=e... > mikeash @mikeash · Dec 21, 2017 > Huge news! I’ll be joining Apple in January to work on the ObjC and Swift runtimes. It’s an amazing chance to work on stuff I’ve tinkered with for years. Friday Q&A will continue, although it might be a bit slower while I get into the swing of things.
    - chmaynard 6y ago
      Hey Mike, it's time to write another blog post about some of the cool stuff you've been working on at Apple. Swift is open source so confidentiality shouldn't be a problem -- right?

auggierose 6y ago

It's not that bad, I've stumbled across that particular article just 1 or 2 weeks ago because I wanted to check what kind of functionality of function builders I can use now for my DSL. It's probably more illuminating though to just try out for yourself... For example, while the article mentions "if let", does that mean "let" also works now? And yes, I wish Apple had proper and up-to-date information on this somewhere.

Grustaf 6y ago

There is a lot of deep material on SwiftUI, for example https:// https:// swiftwithmajid.com and https://swiftui-lab.com https://swiftui-lab.com. The latest edition of the excellent Stanford course also uses SwiftUI, and the tutorials by Apple are great.

LeoNatan25 6y ago
That’s not “deep”. That’s just following the motions to accomplish basic tasks.

transfire 6y ago

> I'm getting old And wiser. Youth is wasted on the young. Unfortunately for the field of software development that means endless gyrations of over engineering and technobabel.

patriotapclypse 6y ago

If you want actual in-depth articles, SwiftRocks has some good ones. For example: https://swiftrocks.com/how-never-works-internally-in-swift https://swiftrocks.com/how-never-works-internally-in-swift I also share this opinion. This hard-on that companies have of making coding easy for everyone will be the field's downfall. Just look how people are outraged whenever algorithm's are mentioned in interviews. I lost track of how many people with "senior" positions coming to interview at my company and showing that they know absolutely nothing about anything. My explanation for this is that you have a bunch of people from other areas coming to tech simply because it's easy money. They don't care about becoming the next legendary developer or something like that, they just wanna make easy money. The result is that everything gets dumbed down as a result. I really hate this and it probably means that a lot of important knowledge will be lost when the old dogs die.

LeoNatan25 6y ago
That was a good article, thank you! Exactly what I expected from this “deep dive”.

swiley 6y ago

I think part of the issue is that there are fewer and fewer people who are both apple enthusiasts and have been apple developers for a long time. Up until snow leopard lots of very old APIs had been kept around so actually pulling things apart was not only an interesting thing to do but even profitable (because the knowledge gained would be useful for years.) Contrast Apple's current generation of operating systems where the API churn is comparable to lots of JS frameworks. Not to mention how unfriendly the company has been to smaller developers

jdmoreira 6y ago

I'm not disagreeing with you but I want to come here in defence of John Sundell as an excellent Swift programmer that is releasing amazing open source code. I don't consume his content (neither his website nor his podcast) but he sure knows his Swift. His recent code is probably some of the best Swift code I've seen and I have very high standards for that. He creates amazing DSLs / abstractions / APIs by leveraging the type system which in my opinion is exactly what Swift should be about.