
The rise and fall of Apple's Swift - sandrobfc
https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/the-future-of-apple-swift
======
skywhopper
I'm not sure what the point is here. It feels like a bunch of disconnected
thoughts and observations about Swift, none of them pursued very far. Some of
them seem to contradict each other. And none of them are particularly striking
or insightful.

~~~
madrox
Their entire web site reads this way. Either it's all an experiment to see if
RNN-generated posts can fool HN or English is not the native language.

~~~
mulletbum
Is the title bad English or am I reading it incorrectly?

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pavlov
I'm a longtime fan of Cocoa and Objective-C. AppKit has pretty much paid my
bills for the past 15 years.

The reason I like Obj-C is the simplicity. You've got C, the most popular and
widely deployed programming language in the world with libraries available for
pretty much everything. Then you add a minimal slice of proven Smalltalk
constructs on top, completely orthogonal to the base language. There's rarely
a question about whether you should be doing something the high-level object-
oriented message passing way, or the low-level C "functions & struct pointers"
way. The two play together with no surprises (unlike C++ which is a minefield
of surprises for the C programmer).

Swift threw away the Smalltalk-like simple dynamism of Objective-C. Instead it
gives you syntax that's got more sprawl than Scala; a swamp of type system
combinatorial explosions that can rival C++; language instability on par with
modern JavaScript; and the _coup de grâce_ is that all this is connected at
the hip to a giant framework that doesn't feel Swift-native because it's
actually an Objective-C API with decades of baggage.

At the same time, Apple likes to pretend that Swift is a beginner-friendly
language. It's a floor wax and a desert topping — and after you've iced the
cake with a thick layer of Swift you can apparently both have it and eat it.

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0xCMP
Definitely seems like Swift is losing right now to things like React Native
and Cordova, but it's not because Swift isn't good, but it isn't Javascript.

Put aside feelings about Javascript and realize that everything is heading
towards Javascript for websites, apps, scripts, command line tools, browsers,
and etc.

It's hard for Swift to compete, like Go and Rust are for instance, when it's
current best use is to make apps for a single platform. They don't have the
vast number of libraries and active maintainers Javascript has. That along
with Swift itself constantly changing (along the same timeframe Go has
maintained it's 1.x guarantee and Javascript has maintained compatibility at
all costs) and I've just recently heard that while Swift appears like a more
powerful Javascript at first the more complicated features rapidly intermingle
in strange ways that the code does not do enough to make clear.

Swift by no means is dead, but it's not the right tool right now for most
people. Most have to develop the backend and web app first and then they go to
iOS. With React Native many don't even need to know Swift to do the 2nd step.

~~~
briandear
Everything is not moving towards JavaScript. In some large subset of
development, sure. And server-side Swift is incredible and still relatively
obscure. Where performance at scale matters, JavaScript is often a bad choice
despite ubiquity.

~~~
0xCMP
Yes, maybe not _everything_ but the trends of Javascript being used everywhere
and for replacing Swift & co. are there. While I prefer native apps over JS
ones it certainly seems that developing on JS apps, whether they're Electron,
React Native, or other, has a much faster development cycle and they're
winning on flexibility, features, and ease of customization.

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eightchen
Swift language features keep improving, and it's easily my favorite language
to code in. The developer tools, on the other hand are complete trash. A large
iOS app written in Swift can easily take 5 minutes to compile, while the
equivalent Objective-C app would take 20 seconds. Additionally, Xcode is one
of the most unstable IDEs out there. Simple things like refactoring a variable
name or looking up a function declaration are barely working.

~~~
rimliu
They tried to improve compile times with Xcode 10 though. Should be getting
better. Same goes for autocompletion, but that's just taking their word for
it. I've got beta installed, but did not spend much time with it (for some
reason the main project I'm working on is failing to compile in it, did not
bother to investigate yet).

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jgust
[https://tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-
definiti...](https://tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-
definition/#Ratings)

They are anchoring their argument about the past and future of Swift as a
popular programming language based on... how many hits it has on a Google
search? Okay.

~~~
WoodenChair
Do you think the rise and fall of searches for Taylor Swift may be having an
impact on Swift's popularity in this index?

~~~
jgust
A quick google search for "taylor swift programming" tells me... maybe.

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orand
Using Stack Overflow tag trends to compare Swift to the other languages and
technologies listed in the article, Swift is still on top. React Native is
climbing fastest, and is almost half-way to where Swift is today.

[http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[swift,objective-c,xamarin,cord...](http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=\[swift,objective-c,xamarin,cordova,react-
native,ionic-framework\])

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ajkjk
Why is every other sentence bold in this article?

~~~
jessemillar
Very good question. It'd be better if they'd just written a tl;dr version of
the article and put it at the top.

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moosingin3space
The answer to this question is simple: Swift does not have a comparative
advantage in any area of development other than Apple-device-only apps. It may
be a nice language, but the cross-platform Swift ecosystem is firmly
entrenched in square one as long as the community continues to prefer other
languages and tools.

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Mononokay
I don't know - it doesn't seem like it has - or will - fall for as long as
Apple keeps control over iOS.

~~~
tfranco
The intentions of the authors is for Swift to take over the world. But the way
it's going, it will probably become stuck on Apple's ecosystem like Objective
C.

~~~
jgh
At least with Objective-C it's pretty trivial to just use C or C++ or whatever
in most places and Objective-C minimally. Swift is a little more of a headache
in that regard.

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Froyoh
More like the Fall and Rise

~~~
mulletbum
Can you explain why? I am having a hard time even understanding what this
article is getting at. What is your perception of it?

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abalone
Meh, the only evidence cited for the “fall” of Swift is an index of how often
people search for “swift programming”.[1] An imperfect measure for sure.

[1] [https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-
defi...](https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definition/)

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Simulacra
This is a very strange article. It's using one metric to make broad
assumptions about the language.

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DatBear
Why is half of every paragraph in bold? How did this clickbait get 30
points...

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mozumder
Swift needs its version of Django/Ruby-on-rails...

~~~
tfranco
There is Vapor. But unlike Rails, the timing for something like this is way
gone.

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DatBear
Why is half of every paragraph in bold for no reason?

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crb002
Apple would be wise to release "beta" C and either C++ or Rust bindings for
iOS. It is LLVM developers care about not Swift.

