4 ms·

Yeah, I started noticing huge flaws in Apple's Music app, which I told them about and work around mostly, but...are they because Apple software is written in C?

Yeah, I started noticing huge flaws in Apple's Music app, which I told them about and work around mostly, but...are they because Apple software is written in C? C++, Objective-C, same thing. Like can C code ever really be airtight?

can16358p 5y ago
I'd say lack of QA. Apple Music (especially on macOS) is EXTREMELY buggy, unresponsive, slow, and feels like a mess to use. Same for iMessage. Other apps are also written using the same stack with almost no bugs. I wouldn't blame the language here, but the teams working on them (or more likely their managers trying to hit unrealistic deadlines).
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  No, I would not blame the teams or their managers. You can't just blame a manager you've never met just because he's a manager, we're talking about the manager of Apple Music, they could very well be capable and well-minded, likely personally capable of coding. So let me give you another example in the same vein as C, where everybody uses a technology that is terrible, questioning it only at the outset, and then just accepting it: keyboard layouts. QWERTY is obsolete. It wasn't designed at random, it would have aged better if it did, it was designed to slow down typing so typewriters wouldn't jam. And secondly, in order for salesmen to type "TYPEWRITER" with just the top row, so the poor woman he was selling didn't realize typewriters were masochistic. So that's how you end up with millions of people hunting and pecking, or getting stuck for months trying to learn touch typing for real with exercises like "sad fad dad." It takes weeks before you can type "the". It's just the network effects of keyboard layouts are just next-level. Peter Thiel talks about this in "Zero to One" as an example of a technology that is objectively inferior but is still widely used because it's so hard to switch, illustrating the power of network effects. I for one did switch, and it was hard because I couldn't type neither Qwerty nor Dvorak for a month. But after that Dvorak came easily, you don't need an app to learn to type, you just learn to type by typing, slowly at first, then very soon, very fast. So with regard to C, I would say it is not objectively inferior like QWERTY became, it's actually pretty well designed. It does produce fast code. I use it myself sometimes, not a bad language for simple algorithm prototypes of under 60 lines. But it's based to a huge degree on characters, the difference between code that works and code that fails can come down to characters, C is about characters, pretty much any character, there's no margin of error. Whereas with Lisp, you have parentheses for everything, you have an interpreter but you can also compile it, I am actually able to trust Lisp in a way that is out of the question with C. There's just so incredibly many gotchas and pitfalls, buffer overflows, it's endless, you have to really know what you're doing if you want to do stunts with pointers, memory, void types. I guess the bottom line is if you're want your code to be perfect, and you write it in C, you can't delegate to the language, you yourself have to code that code perfectly in the human capacity of perfection.
  - daniel-cussen 5y ago
    > you can't delegate to the language, you yourself have to code that code perfectly in the human capacity of perfection. Clarifying that what I mean by this is that it's not realistic to expect large C codebases to be perfect. Bug-free, with no exploits. Perfect. Same thing.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - chaosite 5y ago
    You're being downvoted to oblivion, even though your general point (rephrased, C is an unforgiving language and safer languages are a Good Thing) is pretty mainstream. Here are my guesses why: 1. You start off by saying you can't just blame the team or their manager if you're dissatisfied with a product, then instead of explaining why the people who made a piece of software aren't responsible for its faults you go off on a long non-sequitur about QWERTY. 2. Your rant on QWERTY just isn't true. You namedrop Peter Thiel and his book, so if he's your source then he's wrong too. QWERTY is not terrible, not obsolete, it was not designed to slow down typists, and there's no record of salesmen typing "typewriter quote" with just the top row. It's true that it was designed to switch common letters between the left and right hands, but that actually speeds up typing. It also does not take weeks for someone to type "the" ; and if you mean learning touch-typing, I don't know of any study that claims that alternative keyboard layouts are faster to learn. The various alt. keyboard layouts (dvorak, coleman, workman) definitely have their advantages and can be considered better than QWERTY, sure; people have estimated that they can be up to ~30% faster, but realistically, people report increasing their typing speeds by 5-10%; or at least the ones who have previously tried to maximize their typing speeds... If learning a new layout is the first time they'd put effort into that skill, they'd obviously improve more. It's probably also true that these layouts are more efficient in the sense that they require moving the fingers less, reducing the risk of RSI (though you'd really want to use an ergonomic keyboard if that's a concern.) QWERTY is still used because it's not terrible, it's good enough. You can type faster than you can think with it, and for most people that's all they want. There's nothing wrong with any of the alternative layouts, I agree that they're better in some respects, but they're not order-of-magnitudes better as claimed. 3. Your opinions about C are asinine. "not objectively inferior like QWERTY" - So, is C good or not? We're talking about memory safety, C provides literally none. Is this not objectively inferior? Now, I would argue that it's not, it's an engineering trade-off that one can make, trading safety for an abstract machine that's similar to the underlying metal, manual control over memory, etc. But you're not making that point, you're just saying that it's actually good before going on to explain that it's hard to use safely, leaving your readers confused as to what you're trying to argue. "not a bad language for simple algorithm prototypes of under 60 lines" - It's difficult to use C in this way because the standard library is rather bare. If my algorithm needs any sort of non-trivial data-structure I'll have to write it myself, which would make it over 60 lines, or find and use an external library. If I don't have all that work already completed from previous projects, or know that you'll eventually need it in C for some reason, I generally won't reach for C... I'll use a scripting language, or perhaps even C++. Additionally, the places C is commonly used for its strengths (and where it has begun being challenged by a maturing Rust) are the systems programming and embedded spaces, so claiming C is only good for 60-line prototypes is just weird. "C is about characters" - Um, most computer languages are "about characters". There are some visual languages, but I don't think you're comparing C to Scratch here... You can misplace a parentheses with Lisp or make any number of errors that are syntactically correct yet semantically wrong and you'll have errors too, just like in C. Now, most lisps give you a garbage collector and are more strongly typed than C, for instance, features which prevent entire categories of bugs, making those lisps safer. 4. You kinda lost the point there. You started by saying that the people who wrote Apple Music "could very well be capable and well-minded, likely personally capable of coding", i.e., they're good at what they do. Fine, let's assume that. Then, your bottom line is that in C "you have to really know what you're doing" and "you yourself have to code that code perfectly in the human capacity of perfection". What's missing here is a line explaining that humans aren't perfect, and even very capable programmers make mistakes all the time, and having the compiler catch errors would actually be very nice. Then it would flow from your initial points that these are actually fine engineers, but they were hamstrung by C. And the tangent on QWERTY just did not help at all.
saagarjha 5y ago
Bugs in Apple's Music apps have essentially nothing to do with it being written in C++ and Objective-C (and these days a significant portion of it is JavaScript and Swift).
dagmx 5y ago
Apple Music isn't a great example because depending on which OS and version you're running, it's essentially a hosted web application. Or given how new it is, it's likely majority written in Swift when presenting a native app

can16358p 5y ago

I'd say lack of QA. Apple Music (especially on macOS) is EXTREMELY buggy, unresponsive, slow, and feels like a mess to use. Same for iMessage. Other apps are also written using the same stack with almost no bugs. I wouldn't blame the language here, but the teams working on them (or more likely their managers trying to hit unrealistic deadlines).

daniel-cussen 5y ago
No, I would not blame the teams or their managers. You can't just blame a manager you've never met just because he's a manager, we're talking about the manager of Apple Music, they could very well be capable and well-minded, likely personally capable of coding. So let me give you another example in the same vein as C, where everybody uses a technology that is terrible, questioning it only at the outset, and then just accepting it: keyboard layouts. QWERTY is obsolete. It wasn't designed at random, it would have aged better if it did, it was designed to slow down typing so typewriters wouldn't jam. And secondly, in order for salesmen to type "TYPEWRITER" with just the top row, so the poor woman he was selling didn't realize typewriters were masochistic. So that's how you end up with millions of people hunting and pecking, or getting stuck for months trying to learn touch typing for real with exercises like "sad fad dad." It takes weeks before you can type "the". It's just the network effects of keyboard layouts are just next-level. Peter Thiel talks about this in "Zero to One" as an example of a technology that is objectively inferior but is still widely used because it's so hard to switch, illustrating the power of network effects. I for one did switch, and it was hard because I couldn't type neither Qwerty nor Dvorak for a month. But after that Dvorak came easily, you don't need an app to learn to type, you just learn to type by typing, slowly at first, then very soon, very fast. So with regard to C, I would say it is not objectively inferior like QWERTY became, it's actually pretty well designed. It does produce fast code. I use it myself sometimes, not a bad language for simple algorithm prototypes of under 60 lines. But it's based to a huge degree on characters, the difference between code that works and code that fails can come down to characters, C is about characters, pretty much any character, there's no margin of error. Whereas with Lisp, you have parentheses for everything, you have an interpreter but you can also compile it, I am actually able to trust Lisp in a way that is out of the question with C. There's just so incredibly many gotchas and pitfalls, buffer overflows, it's endless, you have to really know what you're doing if you want to do stunts with pointers, memory, void types. I guess the bottom line is if you're want your code to be perfect, and you write it in C, you can't delegate to the language, you yourself have to code that code perfectly in the human capacity of perfection.
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  > you can't delegate to the language, you yourself have to code that code perfectly in the human capacity of perfection. Clarifying that what I mean by this is that it's not realistic to expect large C codebases to be perfect. Bug-free, with no exploits. Perfect. Same thing.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- chaosite 5y ago
  You're being downvoted to oblivion, even though your general point (rephrased, C is an unforgiving language and safer languages are a Good Thing) is pretty mainstream. Here are my guesses why: 1. You start off by saying you can't just blame the team or their manager if you're dissatisfied with a product, then instead of explaining why the people who made a piece of software aren't responsible for its faults you go off on a long non-sequitur about QWERTY. 2. Your rant on QWERTY just isn't true. You namedrop Peter Thiel and his book, so if he's your source then he's wrong too. QWERTY is not terrible, not obsolete, it was not designed to slow down typists, and there's no record of salesmen typing "typewriter quote" with just the top row. It's true that it was designed to switch common letters between the left and right hands, but that actually speeds up typing. It also does not take weeks for someone to type "the" ; and if you mean learning touch-typing, I don't know of any study that claims that alternative keyboard layouts are faster to learn. The various alt. keyboard layouts (dvorak, coleman, workman) definitely have their advantages and can be considered better than QWERTY, sure; people have estimated that they can be up to ~30% faster, but realistically, people report increasing their typing speeds by 5-10%; or at least the ones who have previously tried to maximize their typing speeds... If learning a new layout is the first time they'd put effort into that skill, they'd obviously improve more. It's probably also true that these layouts are more efficient in the sense that they require moving the fingers less, reducing the risk of RSI (though you'd really want to use an ergonomic keyboard if that's a concern.) QWERTY is still used because it's not terrible, it's good enough. You can type faster than you can think with it, and for most people that's all they want. There's nothing wrong with any of the alternative layouts, I agree that they're better in some respects, but they're not order-of-magnitudes better as claimed. 3. Your opinions about C are asinine. "not objectively inferior like QWERTY" - So, is C good or not? We're talking about memory safety, C provides literally none. Is this not objectively inferior? Now, I would argue that it's not, it's an engineering trade-off that one can make, trading safety for an abstract machine that's similar to the underlying metal, manual control over memory, etc. But you're not making that point, you're just saying that it's actually good before going on to explain that it's hard to use safely, leaving your readers confused as to what you're trying to argue. "not a bad language for simple algorithm prototypes of under 60 lines" - It's difficult to use C in this way because the standard library is rather bare. If my algorithm needs any sort of non-trivial data-structure I'll have to write it myself, which would make it over 60 lines, or find and use an external library. If I don't have all that work already completed from previous projects, or know that you'll eventually need it in C for some reason, I generally won't reach for C... I'll use a scripting language, or perhaps even C++. Additionally, the places C is commonly used for its strengths (and where it has begun being challenged by a maturing Rust) are the systems programming and embedded spaces, so claiming C is only good for 60-line prototypes is just weird. "C is about characters" - Um, most computer languages are "about characters". There are some visual languages, but I don't think you're comparing C to Scratch here... You can misplace a parentheses with Lisp or make any number of errors that are syntactically correct yet semantically wrong and you'll have errors too, just like in C. Now, most lisps give you a garbage collector and are more strongly typed than C, for instance, features which prevent entire categories of bugs, making those lisps safer. 4. You kinda lost the point there. You started by saying that the people who wrote Apple Music "could very well be capable and well-minded, likely personally capable of coding", i.e., they're good at what they do. Fine, let's assume that. Then, your bottom line is that in C "you have to really know what you're doing" and "you yourself have to code that code perfectly in the human capacity of perfection". What's missing here is a line explaining that humans aren't perfect, and even very capable programmers make mistakes all the time, and having the compiler catch errors would actually be very nice. Then it would flow from your initial points that these are actually fine engineers, but they were hamstrung by C. And the tangent on QWERTY just did not help at all.

saagarjha 5y ago

Bugs in Apple's Music apps have essentially nothing to do with it being written in C++ and Objective-C (and these days a significant portion of it is JavaScript and Swift).

dagmx 5y ago

Apple Music isn't a great example because depending on which OS and version you're running, it's essentially a hosted web application. Or given how new it is, it's likely majority written in Swift when presenting a native app