Swift Concurrency Roadmap
Yikes. Swift is becoming horribly complex and opaque. Yet another set of @shoehornedKeywords... Colored functions...Let me ramble a bit here.Apple’s platforms had always put users before developers, that’s why they were so successful. They’ve built the best user experience by far using nothing but a simple Smalltalk-esque language from the 80s. Look at their frameworks: CoreAudio, CoreAnimation, UIKit... Tremendously powerful, and the best in their league - in terms of possibilities, not necessarily developer experience! Others were shoving garbage-collected virtual machines in their devices, piling abstraction over abstraction, “fluent APIs” (remember those?); meanwhile Apple built an empire with this quirky dynamic language (plus some C++ under the hood), where you had to do manual reference counting as late as 2012! Developers were livid. “How am I supposed to program in this weird language?” “AutoLayout? Why can’t it be just like CSS or something??”
But Apple didn’t give a shit, they knew their platform, their frameworks were the best, period. And whiny devs had to adapt to gain access to the richest cohort of users in the computing landscape.With Swift and SwiftUI we seem to be heading towards a different future, and I’m yet to be convinced that it’s the right one.