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I just can’t ever see Apple not treating developers like shit and it makes me want to have nothing to do with Swift.

by mdhb 1y ago

microsoftedging 1y ago
Eh. Google are the exact same. Pick your poison.
- mdhb 1y ago
  They actually are not. Take a look at say the two most popular languages to come out of Google being Go and Dart… none of those communities ever really feel hard done by, the tooling is great, the documentation is amazing, it runs everywhere, it’s fast, it’s easy to work with, has excellent cross language interop and they are just generally well supported. I think you’re just going on vibes here but it’s kind of bullshit when you think about it for more than a moment.
  - ARandomerDude 1y ago
    Also the Android and iOS development experiences are vastly different. Android is much more pleasant to work with. Android Studio exists but you don’t need to use it, unlike XCode. I’m very happy writing Android apps using vim and adb.
    - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      I develop for both platforms and don’t agree at all. The Android dev experience has a lot of potential to be good, but it’s dragged down by the unmitigated messes that are Gradle and ProGuard, both of which regularly cause more pain for me than their iOS counterparts (Swift Package Manager and clang’s code stripper). It’s also only been relatively recently that Google has decided it’s ok to be opinionated and provide happy paths for devs to follow in their UI library with Compose. Android Framework was/is notorious for having 5 ways to accomplish any given task and none being “right” or the only one capable of doing what you need being deprecated. And then there’s Kotlin, which is so close to being a great language but dies on weird hills ideologically (e.g. please just give me “if let” syntax, “.let {}” is ugly and automatic unwrapping fails just enough to not be useful). Freedom of editor is nice but doesn’t make up for the rest, at least for me.
      - andrekandre 1y ago
        > it’s dragged down by the unmitigated messes that are Gradle and ProGuard its crazy looking back though, when android studio first came out there was a big hope it would be better than ant but idk personally i also hate gradle with a passion... > “if let” syntax, “.let {}” probably guard let would be even better since it avoids indenting on the happy path but jmo
  - fidotron 1y ago
    People that have been around Dart long enough absolutely felt hard done by. That project burned so much community good will on the way to finally getting slight traction with Flutter.
    - mdhb 1y ago
      I’m actively a part of that community for the past 5 years and I have zero idea what you’re talking about. It’s one of the most loved languages out there when you look at surveys of its users and for good reason.
      - fidotron 1y ago
        5 years is not a long time in Dart. It first appeared in 2011.
        mdhb 1y ago
        Half a decade is more than enough time for me to be able to say with a really high degree of confidence and authority that I’m positive that the situation with Google and Dart is in fact not at all like the situation with Apple and Swift as the OP was implying.
- flakiness 1y ago
  Kotlin, the Android language, isn't owned by Google. it's from Jetbrains. Picking Kotlin is one of a few great decisions Google has done for Android IMO.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Yeah, now they have their own .NET. /s
fuhsnn 1y ago
Even Chris Lattner was treated like shit by Swift core team, that was a shocking read to me: https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgroup/55455/6 https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgr...
- fidotron 1y ago
  That is truly awful, and does reflect badly on the stewardship of the project as a whole, which is a shame. It really is amazing how toxic programming language arguments become.
brink 1y ago
Frustrating that you're being down-voted, because this is a very valid point.
- mdhb 1y ago
  There is something incredibly weird about people associated with Apple. I don’t know what it is but I think people are not wrong to describe it as a cult like mentality sometimes. But they notoriously do not like any criticism no matter how polite or how valid.
  - brink 1y ago
    I imagine that being within the thralls of a $3T company could be very comfortable.
  - homebrewer 1y ago
    Halfway through I thought you were describing Linux fanatics like myself, and so had to reread the comment a couple of times.
frizlab 1y ago
Swift the language itself is incredibly good though.
- brink 1y ago
  I love Indian food, but I still don't want to live in India.
  - frizlab 1y ago
    You don’t have to? To clear out of the analogy Swift is available on all major platforms, no strings attached to Apple (except you have to download Swift from them oc).
- ohdeargodno 1y ago
  That's a very debatable viewpoint. From the horribly slow typecheck that gets exponentially worse every time anyone adds a protocol extension to <very common type>, the debatable choices made with concurrency/async/actors/swift6, the only-very-recently-stable ABI, the regular titanic undertakings needed for bumping any major version that are almost unheard of in most other languages, etc. Swift is an alright language today. Good even. But for a 10 year old language ? It aged horribly, going through senseless breaking changes just to fit Apple's needs. It's fine if you're locked in on Apple's platforms, but any other language doing that would have been set on fire already. Look at how painful the python2/python3 split was: Swift did worse than that, _four_ times.
  - slavapestov 1y ago
    > the only-very-recently-stable ABI, You mean 6 years ago? https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-5-released/ https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-5-released/
    - ohdeargodno 1y ago
      MSVC was laughed at for only providing a stable C++ ABI in 2019. Swift is not immune to the same criticism, and has even fewer excuses for it: we knew for a long time stable ABIs are critical for interop. (And interop with Swift is still laughably bad)

I just can’t ever see Apple not treating developers like shit and it makes me want to have nothing to do with Swift.

by mdhb 1y ago

I just can’t ever see Apple not treating developers like shit and it makes me want to have nothing to do with Swift.

microsoftedging 1y ago

Eh. Google are the exact same. Pick your poison.

mdhb 1y ago
They actually are not. Take a look at say the two most popular languages to come out of Google being Go and Dart… none of those communities ever really feel hard done by, the tooling is great, the documentation is amazing, it runs everywhere, it’s fast, it’s easy to work with, has excellent cross language interop and they are just generally well supported. I think you’re just going on vibes here but it’s kind of bullshit when you think about it for more than a moment.
- ARandomerDude 1y ago
  Also the Android and iOS development experiences are vastly different. Android is much more pleasant to work with. Android Studio exists but you don’t need to use it, unlike XCode. I’m very happy writing Android apps using vim and adb.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    I develop for both platforms and don’t agree at all. The Android dev experience has a lot of potential to be good, but it’s dragged down by the unmitigated messes that are Gradle and ProGuard, both of which regularly cause more pain for me than their iOS counterparts (Swift Package Manager and clang’s code stripper). It’s also only been relatively recently that Google has decided it’s ok to be opinionated and provide happy paths for devs to follow in their UI library with Compose. Android Framework was/is notorious for having 5 ways to accomplish any given task and none being “right” or the only one capable of doing what you need being deprecated. And then there’s Kotlin, which is so close to being a great language but dies on weird hills ideologically (e.g. please just give me “if let” syntax, “.let {}” is ugly and automatic unwrapping fails just enough to not be useful). Freedom of editor is nice but doesn’t make up for the rest, at least for me.
    - andrekandre 1y ago
      > it’s dragged down by the unmitigated messes that are Gradle and ProGuard its crazy looking back though, when android studio first came out there was a big hope it would be better than ant but idk personally i also hate gradle with a passion... > “if let” syntax, “.let {}” probably guard let would be even better since it avoids indenting on the happy path but jmo
- fidotron 1y ago
  People that have been around Dart long enough absolutely felt hard done by. That project burned so much community good will on the way to finally getting slight traction with Flutter.
  - mdhb 1y ago
    I’m actively a part of that community for the past 5 years and I have zero idea what you’re talking about. It’s one of the most loved languages out there when you look at surveys of its users and for good reason.
    - fidotron 1y ago
      5 years is not a long time in Dart. It first appeared in 2011.
      - mdhb 1y ago
        Half a decade is more than enough time for me to be able to say with a really high degree of confidence and authority that I’m positive that the situation with Google and Dart is in fact not at all like the situation with Apple and Swift as the OP was implying.
flakiness 1y ago
Kotlin, the Android language, isn't owned by Google. it's from Jetbrains. Picking Kotlin is one of a few great decisions Google has done for Android IMO.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Yeah, now they have their own .NET. /s

fuhsnn 1y ago

Even Chris Lattner was treated like shit by Swift core team, that was a shocking read to me: https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgroup/55455/6 https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgr...

fidotron 1y ago
That is truly awful, and does reflect badly on the stewardship of the project as a whole, which is a shame. It really is amazing how toxic programming language arguments become.

brink 1y ago

Frustrating that you're being down-voted, because this is a very valid point.

mdhb 1y ago
There is something incredibly weird about people associated with Apple. I don’t know what it is but I think people are not wrong to describe it as a cult like mentality sometimes. But they notoriously do not like any criticism no matter how polite or how valid.
- brink 1y ago
  I imagine that being within the thralls of a $3T company could be very comfortable.
- homebrewer 1y ago
  Halfway through I thought you were describing Linux fanatics like myself, and so had to reread the comment a couple of times.

frizlab 1y ago

Swift the language itself is incredibly good though.

brink 1y ago
I love Indian food, but I still don't want to live in India.
- frizlab 1y ago
  You don’t have to? To clear out of the analogy Swift is available on all major platforms, no strings attached to Apple (except you have to download Swift from them oc).
ohdeargodno 1y ago
That's a very debatable viewpoint. From the horribly slow typecheck that gets exponentially worse every time anyone adds a protocol extension to <very common type>, the debatable choices made with concurrency/async/actors/swift6, the only-very-recently-stable ABI, the regular titanic undertakings needed for bumping any major version that are almost unheard of in most other languages, etc. Swift is an alright language today. Good even. But for a 10 year old language ? It aged horribly, going through senseless breaking changes just to fit Apple's needs. It's fine if you're locked in on Apple's platforms, but any other language doing that would have been set on fire already. Look at how painful the python2/python3 split was: Swift did worse than that, _four_ times.
- slavapestov 1y ago
  > the only-very-recently-stable ABI, You mean 6 years ago? https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-5-released/ https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-5-released/
  - ohdeargodno 1y ago
    MSVC was laughed at for only providing a stable C++ ABI in 2019. Swift is not immune to the same criticism, and has even fewer excuses for it: we knew for a long time stable ABIs are critical for interop. (And interop with Swift is still laughably bad)