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which sucks because apple had the chance not to repeat their mistake with Objective-C .. but history repeats itself. No matter how much apple market share in w

which sucks because apple had the chance not to repeat their mistake with Objective-C .. but history repeats itself. No matter how much apple market share in whatever market grows, developers want to be able to switch platforms and not have to think about the language.

snek_case 5y ago
Vendor lock-in will always inevitably backfire, because developers and users don't want to be trapped. It might work to maximize profits in the short to medium term, but there's very strong financial incentives not to be stuck with a single platform. Vendor lock-in could mean the death of your product, or even your whole business.
- infogulch 5y ago
  Most new products are positioned to grow into a form of locked-in market that you can extract value from, drawing a box around their customers for the sole purpose of squeezing it in the future. This business strategy is a mind virus and has even overtaken the aspirations of bright-eyed entrepreneurs. The aim has fallen from the simple "get rich by selling a $1 item to 10 million people" down to "create a product where customers are trapped in a dependency relationship with the product by design, give it away below cost to push out alternatives, then flip it and squeeze them for as much as possible" (where the last part is omitted from the initial business plan but still implied, and enabled by outsourcing the dirty work to new management via buyout). The primary goal should be to maximize value, and within that a balanced tension between maximizing delivered value vs maximizing captured value. It's reasonable to be compensated for the value you add, but it needs to be in service of maximizing value in general. If the correct hierarchy of goals is inverted and capturing value becomes the primary aim then it inevitably devolves into this antisocial, monopolistic, lock-in behavior.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  I'd say at least 95% of Swift users don't mind at all that it's mostly an Apple language.
  - samhw 5y ago
    Well, and 95% of heroin users don't mind needles and constipation. It's trivially true that the people who end up using a product are mostly the people who are content with its tradeoffs. That doesn't say much at all about whether those tradeoffs are ultimately optimal.
    - Grustaf 5y ago
      I don't know about optimal, but I've been a Swift developer since day 1 and yet never heard anyone I know complain about Swift being to Apple centric. It's typically armchair philosophers online that have purity concerns, not practical developers.
      - b3morales 5y ago
        I don't have a problem with it being Apple controlled. I have a problem with it being presented as an open project while simultaneously Apple completely controls its trajectory and maintains private forks of everything, which are where the developer tools are actually built from. If it was a closed process where neat stuff just dropped out of the sky each year, that would be fine. When features drop out of nowhere each year and then get laundered through ex post facto public "review", then I take issue. If it was a closed process then we would expect that only features coming from Apple would exist. In a truly open process there would be facilitation for contributions from people outside the organization. In the Swift project as it is currently run, those contributions have withered on the vine; the core team doesn't particularly welcome or support anything that didn't originate internally.
        Grustaf 5y ago
        This is a textbook example of what I meant by philosophers obsessed with purity. And it doesn't sound like you're actually following Swift Evolution. A) Most of what happens is done in public, only rarely do they hide stuff until the last minute, like result builders for SwiftUI. B) As far as I know, they have never claimed that it's going to be completely open and 100% community controlled. The core team is mostly Apple employees, that is not a secret.
dmitriid 5y ago
> apple had the chance not to repeat their mistake with Objective-C .. but history repeats itself. Objective-C has served them for over 40 years, building several different OSes over a multitude of CPUS and platforms. If anything, Swift would welcome a repeat of this history.
- MAGZine 5y ago
  You can build OSes in many different languages, and compile software to many different CPUs and architectures. That alone does not make it good.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    APIs designed for and built in Objective-C have been the mainstay of Apple application development ever since the Cocoa framework, stretching all the way back to NeXTSTEP in the 1980s. Even with the advent of Swift, most of today's iOS and macOS APIs carry the legacy of Objective-C. Much of development with Swift has involved with attempting to use the new language for old APIs. Perhaps legacy alone does not make it good, but it certainly demonstrates that there has not been a need to rewrite all of it using newer languages, that Objective-C has been reliable and venerable.
mehrdada 5y ago
Objective-C was not originally designed by Apple (or NeXT)
andrewcl 5y ago
Objective-C is such a small and concise language. It doesn't get in the way of development in quite the same way Swift can delay building out a feature due to bikeshedding.

snek_case 5y ago

Vendor lock-in will always inevitably backfire, because developers and users don't want to be trapped. It might work to maximize profits in the short to medium term, but there's very strong financial incentives not to be stuck with a single platform. Vendor lock-in could mean the death of your product, or even your whole business.

infogulch 5y ago
Most new products are positioned to grow into a form of locked-in market that you can extract value from, drawing a box around their customers for the sole purpose of squeezing it in the future. This business strategy is a mind virus and has even overtaken the aspirations of bright-eyed entrepreneurs. The aim has fallen from the simple "get rich by selling a $1 item to 10 million people" down to "create a product where customers are trapped in a dependency relationship with the product by design, give it away below cost to push out alternatives, then flip it and squeeze them for as much as possible" (where the last part is omitted from the initial business plan but still implied, and enabled by outsourcing the dirty work to new management via buyout). The primary goal should be to maximize value, and within that a balanced tension between maximizing delivered value vs maximizing captured value. It's reasonable to be compensated for the value you add, but it needs to be in service of maximizing value in general. If the correct hierarchy of goals is inverted and capturing value becomes the primary aim then it inevitably devolves into this antisocial, monopolistic, lock-in behavior.
Grustaf 5y ago
I'd say at least 95% of Swift users don't mind at all that it's mostly an Apple language.
- samhw 5y ago
  Well, and 95% of heroin users don't mind needles and constipation. It's trivially true that the people who end up using a product are mostly the people who are content with its tradeoffs. That doesn't say much at all about whether those tradeoffs are ultimately optimal.
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    I don't know about optimal, but I've been a Swift developer since day 1 and yet never heard anyone I know complain about Swift being to Apple centric. It's typically armchair philosophers online that have purity concerns, not practical developers.
    - b3morales 5y ago
      I don't have a problem with it being Apple controlled. I have a problem with it being presented as an open project while simultaneously Apple completely controls its trajectory and maintains private forks of everything, which are where the developer tools are actually built from. If it was a closed process where neat stuff just dropped out of the sky each year, that would be fine. When features drop out of nowhere each year and then get laundered through ex post facto public "review", then I take issue. If it was a closed process then we would expect that only features coming from Apple would exist. In a truly open process there would be facilitation for contributions from people outside the organization. In the Swift project as it is currently run, those contributions have withered on the vine; the core team doesn't particularly welcome or support anything that didn't originate internally.
      - Grustaf 5y ago
        This is a textbook example of what I meant by philosophers obsessed with purity. And it doesn't sound like you're actually following Swift Evolution. A) Most of what happens is done in public, only rarely do they hide stuff until the last minute, like result builders for SwiftUI. B) As far as I know, they have never claimed that it's going to be completely open and 100% community controlled. The core team is mostly Apple employees, that is not a secret.

dmitriid 5y ago

> apple had the chance not to repeat their mistake with Objective-C .. but history repeats itself. Objective-C has served them for over 40 years, building several different OSes over a multitude of CPUS and platforms. If anything, Swift would welcome a repeat of this history.

MAGZine 5y ago
You can build OSes in many different languages, and compile software to many different CPUs and architectures. That alone does not make it good.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  APIs designed for and built in Objective-C have been the mainstay of Apple application development ever since the Cocoa framework, stretching all the way back to NeXTSTEP in the 1980s. Even with the advent of Swift, most of today's iOS and macOS APIs carry the legacy of Objective-C. Much of development with Swift has involved with attempting to use the new language for old APIs. Perhaps legacy alone does not make it good, but it certainly demonstrates that there has not been a need to rewrite all of it using newer languages, that Objective-C has been reliable and venerable.

mehrdada 5y ago

Objective-C was not originally designed by Apple (or NeXT)

andrewcl 5y ago

Objective-C is such a small and concise language. It doesn't get in the way of development in quite the same way Swift can delay building out a feature due to bikeshedding.