undefined | Better HN

0 pointsisodev4mo ago0 comments

I think what has changed mainly is that today we have tools, languages and entire ecosystems that exist only as means to support someone’s product line.

Take Swift for example. A giant gatekeeper of a corp decided to make it the only (reasonable) way to build apps and so it exists, powered by countless indie developers constantly creating content around it. Would Swift be a thing without everyone being forced to use it? I don’t know, but I don’t think so.

So in some ways we’ve traded unique and effective solutions to “popular and mainstream” things that scream the loudest. You wouldn’t get fired for choosing Swift. Or Azure.

0 comments

ModernMech4mo ago

Yeah, Swift was born because Apple had an ecosystem and they needed to fill it with a language. Erlang was born because Ericsson had a problem and they needed to solve it with a language.

Cthulhu_4mo ago

When I was working with it (I was there, 4000 years ago) there was some talk about Swift for the server, but neither obj-C nor Swift ever really breached containment of the Apple ecosystem and -tooling. Which is a shame because at the time I enjoyed working in XCode. Who knew using a mouse swipe to go back in your code would be so natural? Not any other IDE developer, ever.

Last time I worked with it it felt very sluggish and buggy though, in theory building UI elements with SwiftUI is great, in practice it was slow and needed to restart very often, and that was with simple components.

skydhash4mo ago

That is why I don’t like those ecosystems. They’re all relying on magic (code generation and indexing) for everything instead of just providing a good notation.

If you’re creating that closed of an ecosystem, at least learn from history and create something like smalltalk.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse