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I agree with you. Swift should have been a modernized Objective-C. It should have kept the best parts of it, which made it a joy to use, and leave the archaic

by ardit33 2mo ago

I agree with you. Swift should have been a modernized Objective-C. It should have kept the best parts of it, which made it a joy to use, and leave the archaic and the weird things behind. it would have been a great language, meanwhile they decided to throw everything out and created a language that it is overcomplex, and it is failing to gain any traction outside iOS / Apple's ecosystem. Basically, if you weren't required to use it, nobody would, which makes it a failure. SwiftUI, should have been a rendering template/library integrated with UIKit. Also, cleaning up some of the UIKit syntanx and framework (simplifying it), and use SwiftUI as a template for UI, would have been ideal. SwiftUI instead was pitched as replacement, yet it is not near as capable as UIKit, and it is not feature parity even 7 years later. Just bad leadership by Apple in this case. (probably many of these decissions were 'promo / resume padding driven' as it happens in many large companies).

ksec 2mo ago
While reading this comment, two of Steve Job's line pops up in my head. I think it was the Apple Park opening, and Steve response to insult in WWDC 199x. > "We need to be true to ourselves, and remember what is important, that is what going to keep Apple Apple, is if we keep us, us." > "You have got to start with the customers experience and work backwards to the technology. Right now it feels a lot like Apple without Steve Jobs the first time round. On paper there are a lot of cool tech being worked on. But in the end it was tech from NeXT that really shines. And a lot of these tech don't actually benefits the customers. If the choice was a language and framework that is slightly harder to developers but brings overall higher quality Apps because the barrier is higher. Compared to a language that wants to replace Assembly to Javascript while being easy to learn like Visual Basic and for everyone to code. I would much rather pick the former. Edit: I suddenly remember I also submitted a Core Animation introduction video from Steve a while ago on HN [1]. 20 years later we have gone backwards on a lot of things. [1] https://x.com/lucaslovexoxo/status/2082098579632783441 https://x.com/lucaslovexoxo/status/2082098579632783441
- jstsch 2mo ago
  I remember this video, from way back. Then, it was impressive, but it also felt logical that machines of that era were able to do it. So it wasn't magic. Just good engineering. Now everything is jank & stutter and my 64GB 25 times more powerful machine just refused to play back a YouTube video in my Safari tab since I have too many windows open.
  - MichaelZuo 2mo ago
    My base 2019 macbook pro 15 on Mojave is actually faster than new macbook pros today on some tasks. There’s no way Apple doesn’t know about that internally. So I don’t see any other explanation… other than a lack of care, or a bozo explosion.
    - simlevesque 2mo ago
      Which tasks ? I don't believe your claims.
      - MichaelZuo 2mo ago
        If you dont believe me… nobody is stopping you from testing various things on the same model? And if you dont have it already… then what could I possibly say that would motivate you to buy a used one to do the testing to confirm? Edit: And even on my ipad pro m2 doing literally nothing other than swiping to the app library often causes a visible stutter and lag for hundreds of miliseconds… so if you really think it’s flat out impossible to find consistently slower things on the much more complex macos… idk what to say.
        simlevesque 2mo ago
        Why should I need to do any testing ? I'm just going to keep on not believing you until you back up your claims. And your iPad example doesn't make sense at all, you compared 2 Macbooks and now you're talking about another OS altogether. > idk what to say. You could just tell us one example of something that's faster on your 2019 Macbook Pro 15 versus a M5 Macbook pro and how to reproduce it.
- meerita 2mo ago
  I completely agree. Apple went from making “wow” products to “meh” products. Everything started to decline after Steve passed away.
mac-mc 2mo ago
I wrote something similar a couple years ago too after having a pretty bad time with swift ui and concurrency: https://medium.com/goodones/pareto-optimal-apple-devtools-b47e79b6676f https://medium.com/goodones/pareto-optimal-apple-devtools-b4...
mpweiher 2mo ago
> Swift should have been a modernized Objective-C. It should have kept the best parts of it, which made it a joy to use, and leave the archaic and the weird things behind. That's what Objective-Smalltalk is, or rather, what it started out as. https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/12/the-4-stages-of-objective-smalltalk.html https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/12/the-4-stages-of-objectiv... It has now gone further to actually implement Brad Cox's idea of a "Software IC", by taking on ideas from software architecture and metaobject protocols. https://2024.splashcon.org/details/splash-2024-Onward-papers/9/Beyond-Procedure-Calls-as-Component-Glue-Connectors-Deserve-Metaclass-Status https://2024.splashcon.org/details/splash-2024-Onward-papers... > SwiftUI, should have been a rendering template/library integrated with UIKit. Do you mean it should have used some sort of XML-ish/HTML-ish templating mechanism? For Interscript, I keep looking at that approach, but so far haven't gone down that road (except for HTMXNative, but there it actually is HTML, so...).
saagarjha 2mo ago
> it would have been a great language, meanwhile they decided to throw everything out and created a language that it is overcomplex, and it is failing to gain any traction outside iOS / Apple's ecosystem. Basically, if you weren't required to use it, nobody would, which makes it a failure. Which means Objective-C was a failure, right?
- dosisking 2mo ago
  Since macOS and iOS would not exist without Objective-C, the answer is No, it was not a failure.
  - saagarjha 2mo ago
    This does not answer my question.
pjmlp 2mo ago
So just like Objective-C? Rescued by NeXT's acquisition, having failed to gain market adoption otherwise.
- dosisking 2mo ago
  The Objective C at StepStone was completely different than the one at NeXT. It was very primitive. Steve Naroff did pretty much all of the heavy lifting, and turned Objective C into a language that could be used to create NeXTStep, and then OS X, and eventually iPhone.
dwaite 2mo ago
> and leave the archaic and the weird things behind. The number one archiac/weird thing was message passing instead of methods. Number two was square brackets for message passing. What would be left of Objective-C once these were left behind? > and it is failing to gain any traction outside iOS / Apple's ecosystem. Objective-C was on a path to gain serious traction outside of the Apple ecosystem?
- dosisking 2mo ago
  Forcing Swift instead of Objective C caused the good programmers to leave, and attracted the mediocre developers

by ardit33 2mo ago

ksec 2mo ago

While reading this comment, two of Steve Job's line pops up in my head. I think it was the Apple Park opening, and Steve response to insult in WWDC 199x. > "We need to be true to ourselves, and remember what is important, that is what going to keep Apple Apple, is if we keep us, us." > "You have got to start with the customers experience and work backwards to the technology. Right now it feels a lot like Apple without Steve Jobs the first time round. On paper there are a lot of cool tech being worked on. But in the end it was tech from NeXT that really shines. And a lot of these tech don't actually benefits the customers. If the choice was a language and framework that is slightly harder to developers but brings overall higher quality Apps because the barrier is higher. Compared to a language that wants to replace Assembly to Javascript while being easy to learn like Visual Basic and for everyone to code. I would much rather pick the former. Edit: I suddenly remember I also submitted a Core Animation introduction video from Steve a while ago on HN [1]. 20 years later we have gone backwards on a lot of things. [1] https://x.com/lucaslovexoxo/status/2082098579632783441 https://x.com/lucaslovexoxo/status/2082098579632783441

jstsch 2mo ago
I remember this video, from way back. Then, it was impressive, but it also felt logical that machines of that era were able to do it. So it wasn't magic. Just good engineering. Now everything is jank & stutter and my 64GB 25 times more powerful machine just refused to play back a YouTube video in my Safari tab since I have too many windows open.
- MichaelZuo 2mo ago
  My base 2019 macbook pro 15 on Mojave is actually faster than new macbook pros today on some tasks. There’s no way Apple doesn’t know about that internally. So I don’t see any other explanation… other than a lack of care, or a bozo explosion.
  - simlevesque 2mo ago
    Which tasks ? I don't believe your claims.
    - MichaelZuo 2mo ago
      If you dont believe me… nobody is stopping you from testing various things on the same model? And if you dont have it already… then what could I possibly say that would motivate you to buy a used one to do the testing to confirm? Edit: And even on my ipad pro m2 doing literally nothing other than swiping to the app library often causes a visible stutter and lag for hundreds of miliseconds… so if you really think it’s flat out impossible to find consistently slower things on the much more complex macos… idk what to say.
      - simlevesque 2mo ago
        Why should I need to do any testing ? I'm just going to keep on not believing you until you back up your claims. And your iPad example doesn't make sense at all, you compared 2 Macbooks and now you're talking about another OS altogether. > idk what to say. You could just tell us one example of something that's faster on your 2019 Macbook Pro 15 versus a M5 Macbook pro and how to reproduce it.
meerita 2mo ago
I completely agree. Apple went from making “wow” products to “meh” products. Everything started to decline after Steve passed away.

mac-mc 2mo ago

I wrote something similar a couple years ago too after having a pretty bad time with swift ui and concurrency: https://medium.com/goodones/pareto-optimal-apple-devtools-b47e79b6676f https://medium.com/goodones/pareto-optimal-apple-devtools-b4...

mpweiher 2mo ago

> Swift should have been a modernized Objective-C. It should have kept the best parts of it, which made it a joy to use, and leave the archaic and the weird things behind. That's what Objective-Smalltalk is, or rather, what it started out as. https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/12/the-4-stages-of-objective-smalltalk.html https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/12/the-4-stages-of-objectiv... It has now gone further to actually implement Brad Cox's idea of a "Software IC", by taking on ideas from software architecture and metaobject protocols. https://2024.splashcon.org/details/splash-2024-Onward-papers/9/Beyond-Procedure-Calls-as-Component-Glue-Connectors-Deserve-Metaclass-Status https://2024.splashcon.org/details/splash-2024-Onward-papers... > SwiftUI, should have been a rendering template/library integrated with UIKit. Do you mean it should have used some sort of XML-ish/HTML-ish templating mechanism? For Interscript, I keep looking at that approach, but so far haven't gone down that road (except for HTMXNative, but there it actually is HTML, so...).

saagarjha 2mo ago

> it would have been a great language, meanwhile they decided to throw everything out and created a language that it is overcomplex, and it is failing to gain any traction outside iOS / Apple's ecosystem. Basically, if you weren't required to use it, nobody would, which makes it a failure. Which means Objective-C was a failure, right?

dosisking 2mo ago
Since macOS and iOS would not exist without Objective-C, the answer is No, it was not a failure.
- saagarjha 2mo ago
  This does not answer my question.

pjmlp 2mo ago

So just like Objective-C? Rescued by NeXT's acquisition, having failed to gain market adoption otherwise.

dosisking 2mo ago
The Objective C at StepStone was completely different than the one at NeXT. It was very primitive. Steve Naroff did pretty much all of the heavy lifting, and turned Objective C into a language that could be used to create NeXTStep, and then OS X, and eventually iPhone.

dwaite 2mo ago

> and leave the archaic and the weird things behind. The number one archiac/weird thing was message passing instead of methods. Number two was square brackets for message passing. What would be left of Objective-C once these were left behind? > and it is failing to gain any traction outside iOS / Apple's ecosystem. Objective-C was on a path to gain serious traction outside of the Apple ecosystem?

dosisking 2mo ago
Forcing Swift instead of Objective C caused the good programmers to leave, and attracted the mediocre developers