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> Whatever it is, SwiftUI isn't it. I think this opinion is heavily shared by Swift developers now, but the messaging every WWDC is always "Swift and SwiftUI i

> Whatever it is, SwiftUI isn't it. I think this opinion is heavily shared by Swift developers now, but the messaging every WWDC is always "Swift and SwiftUI is the best way to build apps for Apple Platforms", etc.. If you have to keep telling everyone what they don't believe is true, it's a sign there's a problem. It feels like someone with a lot of organizational power is disconnected from the pulse of the community. SwiftUI is undeniably clean in a lot of ways, it presents beautifully and fits on slides well, but that matters less and less, and this all wasn't really working out even before LLMs disrupted things.

steve1977 2mo ago
Well the problem now is Apple would need to admit they made a mistake. And Apple does not make mistakes.
- mpweiher 2mo ago
  Yes, they don't ever openly admit mistakes. But they do quietly drop or fix them, covertly acknowledging they were mistakes. Often with this messaging: "we have this new shiny thing that is even better than the old shiny thing (that was really a turd)". Remember "garbage collection"? Or "modern syntax"? Or CocoaJava? And with hardware they had their "come to Jesus" moment a while ago. And then hit it out of the ballpark with Apple Silicon. The one for software is still upcoming.
  - mort96 2mo ago
    SwiftUI is too big to silently drop. It is too difficult to silently fix.
    - steve1977 2mo ago
      So the only way out is something new again.
      - mpweiher 2mo ago
        Happy to rename my stuff "Objective-Swift" :-)
  - pjmlp 2mo ago
    CocoaJava was when they were not certain devs educated in C++ and Object Pascal would ever accept Objective-C. Garbage collection is still there, regardless of the marketing message without fundamentals from CS theory of automatic memory management algorithms, because they need to blame something else other than themselves, Apple does no wrong.
    - mpweiher 2mo ago
      > CocoaJava was when they were not certain devs educated in C++ and Object Pascal would ever accept Objective-C. They actually went all in on CocoaJava. I was there for the WWDC. > Garbage collection is still there "Garbage collection is deprecated in OS X 10.8. Use ARC instead—see Transitioning to ARC Release Notes." https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsgarbagecollector https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsgarba...
      - pjmlp 2mo ago
        > They actually went all in on CocoaJava. I was there for the WWDC. Of course they did, until they saw the Objective-C adoption numbers were high enough. > "Garbage collection is deprecated in OS X 10.8. Use ARC instead—see Transitioning to ARC Release Notes." ARC is garbage collection, of course mighty Apple won't acknowledge that, because it doesn't suit their marketing, and they are to sell ARC after the Objective-C 2.0 conservative GC failure, given the underlying C semantics. So they need to sell ARC as the great saviour, so much better than "GC". https://gchandbook.org/contents.html https://gchandbook.org/contents.html https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/2008-415/reading/bacon-garbage.pdf https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/2008-415/reading/bacon-g...
        mpweiher 2mo ago
        > until they saw the Objective-C adoption numbers were high enough. Nope. Until they saw that (a) CocoaJava was a complete dud, not just technically, but also in terms of developers buy in and (b) Cocoa/ObjC was accepted well by a large part of the dev community. > > "Garbage collection is deprecated in OS X 10.8. Use ARC > ARC is garbage collection, In terms of the Apple ecosystem, "Garbage Collection" refers to the failed attempt to introduce a tracing garbage collector. Apple/OSX always had reference counting (introduced by NeXT pre-acquisition with Foundation in EOF and later in OPENSTEP 4.0), which technically is also a form of garbage collection, but again in this case the terms are distinct. > So they need to sell ARC as the great saviour, so much better than "GC". Again, in the Apple ecosystem, "Garbage Collection" always referred to the tracing collector, even before they had to abandon it due to it not working. And ARC is markedly better than their GC, but only arguable and at best marginally better than the reference counting they had pre-GC, and in some significant sense worse. Which is why I generally don't use ARC. For my style of programming the benefits are minuscule and the drawbacks real.
- NetMageSCW 2mo ago
  Apple Maps says otherwise.
pjmlp 2mo ago
If you want to see this behaviour dialed to 11, check how Microsoft management talks about WinUI 3.0, and the harsh reality of its sore state of development experience. It would be great if it was half as bad as SwiftUI.

steve1977 2mo ago

Well the problem now is Apple would need to admit they made a mistake. And Apple does not make mistakes.

mpweiher 2mo ago
Yes, they don't ever openly admit mistakes. But they do quietly drop or fix them, covertly acknowledging they were mistakes. Often with this messaging: "we have this new shiny thing that is even better than the old shiny thing (that was really a turd)". Remember "garbage collection"? Or "modern syntax"? Or CocoaJava? And with hardware they had their "come to Jesus" moment a while ago. And then hit it out of the ballpark with Apple Silicon. The one for software is still upcoming.
- mort96 2mo ago
  SwiftUI is too big to silently drop. It is too difficult to silently fix.
  - steve1977 2mo ago
    So the only way out is something new again.
    - mpweiher 2mo ago
      Happy to rename my stuff "Objective-Swift" :-)
- pjmlp 2mo ago
  CocoaJava was when they were not certain devs educated in C++ and Object Pascal would ever accept Objective-C. Garbage collection is still there, regardless of the marketing message without fundamentals from CS theory of automatic memory management algorithms, because they need to blame something else other than themselves, Apple does no wrong.
  - mpweiher 2mo ago
    > CocoaJava was when they were not certain devs educated in C++ and Object Pascal would ever accept Objective-C. They actually went all in on CocoaJava. I was there for the WWDC. > Garbage collection is still there "Garbage collection is deprecated in OS X 10.8. Use ARC instead—see Transitioning to ARC Release Notes." https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsgarbagecollector https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsgarba...
    - pjmlp 2mo ago
      > They actually went all in on CocoaJava. I was there for the WWDC. Of course they did, until they saw the Objective-C adoption numbers were high enough. > "Garbage collection is deprecated in OS X 10.8. Use ARC instead—see Transitioning to ARC Release Notes." ARC is garbage collection, of course mighty Apple won't acknowledge that, because it doesn't suit their marketing, and they are to sell ARC after the Objective-C 2.0 conservative GC failure, given the underlying C semantics. So they need to sell ARC as the great saviour, so much better than "GC". https://gchandbook.org/contents.html https://gchandbook.org/contents.html https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/2008-415/reading/bacon-garbage.pdf https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/2008-415/reading/bacon-g...
      - mpweiher 2mo ago
        > until they saw the Objective-C adoption numbers were high enough. Nope. Until they saw that (a) CocoaJava was a complete dud, not just technically, but also in terms of developers buy in and (b) Cocoa/ObjC was accepted well by a large part of the dev community. > > "Garbage collection is deprecated in OS X 10.8. Use ARC > ARC is garbage collection, In terms of the Apple ecosystem, "Garbage Collection" refers to the failed attempt to introduce a tracing garbage collector. Apple/OSX always had reference counting (introduced by NeXT pre-acquisition with Foundation in EOF and later in OPENSTEP 4.0), which technically is also a form of garbage collection, but again in this case the terms are distinct. > So they need to sell ARC as the great saviour, so much better than "GC". Again, in the Apple ecosystem, "Garbage Collection" always referred to the tracing collector, even before they had to abandon it due to it not working. And ARC is markedly better than their GC, but only arguable and at best marginally better than the reference counting they had pre-GC, and in some significant sense worse. Which is why I generally don't use ARC. For my style of programming the benefits are minuscule and the drawbacks real.
NetMageSCW 2mo ago
Apple Maps says otherwise.

pjmlp 2mo ago

If you want to see this behaviour dialed to 11, check how Microsoft management talks about WinUI 3.0, and the harsh reality of its sore state of development experience. It would be great if it was half as bad as SwiftUI.