The fact that Swift is an Apple baby should indeed be considered a red flag. I know there are some Objective-C lovers out there but I think it is an abomination.

Apple is (was?) good at hardware design and UX, but they pretty bad at producing software.

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bunderbunder 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For what it’s worth, ObjC is not Apple’s brainchild. It just came along for the ride when they chose NEXTSTEP as the basis for Mac OS X.

I haven’t used it in a couple decades, but I do remember it fondly. I also suspect I’d hate it nowadays. Its roots are in a language that seemed revolutionary in the 80s and 90s - Smalltalk - and the melding of it with C also seemed revolutionary at the time. But the very same features that made it great then probably (just speculating - again I haven’t used it in a couple decades) aren’t so great now because a different evolutionary tree leapfrogged ahead of it. So most investment went into developing different solutions to the same problems, and ObjC, like Smalltalk, ends up being a weird anachronism that doesn’t play so nicely with modern tooling.

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PaulDavisThe1st 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've never written whole applications in ObjC but have had to dabble with it as part of Ardour (ardour.org) implementation details for macOS.

I think it's a great language! As long as you can tolerate dynamic dispatch, you really do get the best of C/C++ combined with its run-time manipulable object type system. I have no reason to use it for more code than I have to, but I never grimace if I know I'm going to have to deal with it. Method swizzling is such a neat trick!

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bunderbunder 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It is, and that’s part of what I loved about it. But it’s also the kind of trick that can quickly become a source of chaos on a project with many contributors and a lot of contributor churn, like we tend to get nowadays. Because - and this was the real point of Dijkstra’s famous paper; GOTO was just the most salient concrete example at the time - control flow mechanisms tend to be inscrutable in proportion to their power.

And, much like what happened to GOTO 40 years ago, language designers have invented less powerful language features that are perfectly acceptable 90% solutions. e.g. nowadays I’d generally pick higher order functions or the strategy pattern over method swizzling because they’re more amenable to static analysis and easier to trace with typical IDE tooling.

	▲	PaulDavisThe1st 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't really want to defend method swizzling (it's grotesque from some entirely reasonable perspectives). However, it does work on external/3rd party code (e.g. audio plugins) even when you don't have control over their source code. I'm not sure you can pull that off with "better" approaches ...

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hippo22 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Many of the built-in types in Objective C all have names beginning with “NS” like “NSString”. The NS stands for NeXTSTEP. I always found it insane that so many years later, every iPhone on Earth was running software written in a language released in the 80s. It’s definitely a weird language, but really quite pleasant once you get used to it, especially compared to other languages from the same time period. It’s truly remarkable they made something with such staying power.

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LeFantome 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>It’s truly remarkable they made something with such staying power

What has had the staying power is the API because that API is for an operating system that has had that staying power. As you hint, the macOS of today is simply the evolution of NeXTSTEP (released in 1989). And iOS is just a light version of it.

But 1989 is not all that remarkable. The Linux API (POSIX) was introduced in 1988 but started in 1984 and based on an API that emerged in the 70s. And the Windows API goes back to 1985. Apple is the newest API of the three.

As far as languages go, the Ladybird team is abandoning Swift to stick with C++ which was released back in 1979. And of course C++ is just an evolution of C which goes back to 1972 and which almost all of Linux is still written in.

And what is Ladybird even? It is an HTML interpretter. HTML was introduced in 1993. Guess what operating system HTML and the first web browser was created on. That is right...NeXTSTEP.

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bunderbunder 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In some ways ObjC’s and the NEXTSTEP API’s staying power is more impressive because they survived the failure of their relatively small patron organization. POSIX and C++ were developed at and supported by tech titans - the 1970s and 1980s equivalents of FAANG. Meanwhile back at the turn of the century we had all witnessed the demise of NeXT and many of us were anticipating the demise of Apple, and there was no particularly strong reason to believe that a union of the two would fare any better, let alone grow to become one of the A’s in FAANG.

I actually suspect that ObjC and the NeXT APIs played a big part in that success. I know they’ve fallen out of favor now, and for reasons I have to assume are good. But back in the early 2000s, the difference in how quickly I could develop a good GUI for OS X compared to what I was used to on Windows and GNOME was life changing. It attracted a bunch of developers to the platform, not just me, which spurred an accumulation of applications with noticeably better UX that, in turn, helped fuel Apple’s consumer sentiment revival.

	▲	flomo an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Good take. Even back in the 1990s, OpenStep was thought to be the best way to develop a Windows app. But NeXT charged per-seat licenses, so it didn't get much use outside of Wall Street or other places where Jobs would personally show up. And of course something like iPhone is easier when they already had a UI framework and an IDE and etc.

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5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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satvikpendem 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, there are many more devices running on a language written in the 70s.

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bunderbunder 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Assuming you mean C (C++ is an 80s child), that’s trivially true because devices with an ObjC SDK are a strict subset of devices that are running on C.

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satvikpendem 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, that is why I don't find it "insane" like the grandparent does, like yeah, devices run old languages because those languages work well for their intended purpose.

	▲	hippo22 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You should feel that C’s longevity is insane. How many languages have come and gone in the meantime? C is truly an impressive language that profoundly moved humanity forward. If that’s not insane (used colloquially) to you, then what is?

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stephc_int13 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Next was more or less an Apple spinoff, that was later acquired by Apple. Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture. And with Swift they are painting themselves into a corner.

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LeFantome 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture

Objective-C was actually created by a company called Stepstone that wanted what they saw as the productivity benefits of Smalltalk (OOP) with the performance and portability of C. Originally, Objective-C was seen as a C "pre-compiler".

One of the companies that licensed Objective-C was NeXT. They also saw pervasive OOP as a more productive way to build GUI applications. That was the core value proposition of NeXT.

NeXT ended up basically taking over Objective-C and then it became of a core part of Apple when Apple bought NeXT to create the next-generation of macOS (the one we have now).

So, Objective-C was actually born attempting to "use standards" (C instead of Smalltalk) and really has nothing to do with Apple culture. Of course, Apple and NeXT were brought into the world by Steve Jobs

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addaon 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture.

What language would you have suggested for that mission and that era? Self or Smalltalk and give up on performance on 25-MHz-class processors? C or Pascal and give up an excellent object system with dynamic dispatch?

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stephc_int13 3 hours ago | parent [-]

	▲	addaon 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		C's a great language in 1985, and a great starting point. But development of UI software is one of those areas where object oriented software really shines. What if we could get all the advantages of C as a procedural language, but graft on top an extremely lightweight object system with a spec of < 20 pages to take advantage of these new 1980s-era developments in software engineering, while keeping 100% of the maturity and performance of the C ecosystem? We could call it Objective-C.

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gdwatson 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Years ago I wrote a toy Lisp implementation in Objective-C, ignoring Apple’s standard library and implementing my own class hierarchy. At that point it was basically standard C plus Smalltalk object dispatch, and it was a very cool language for that type of project.

I haven’t used it in Apple’s ecosystem, so maybe I am way off base here. But it seems to me that it was Apple’s effort to evolve the language away from its systems roots into a more suitable applications language that caused all the ugliness.

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isodev 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Some refer to the “Tim Cook doctrine” as a reason for Swift’s existence. It’s not meant to be good, just to fulfill the purpose of controlling that part of their products, so they don’t have to rely on someone else’s tooling.

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stockresearcher 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That doesn’t really make sense though. I thought that they hired Lattner to work on LLVM/clang so they could have a non-gpl compiler and to make whatever extensions they wanted to C/Obj-C. Remember when they added (essentially) closures to C to serve their internal purposes?

So they already got what they wanted without inventing a new language. There must be some other reason.

	▲	Findecanor 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The Accidental Tech podcast had a long interview with Lattner about Swift in 2017 [0]. He makes it out as something that had started as side-project / exploration thing without much of an agenda, which grew mostly because of how good positive feedback the project had got from other developers. He had recently left Apple back then, and supposedly left the future of Swift in other peoples' hands. [0] https://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript#swiftc...

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SirFatty 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That sounds like Microsoft's doctrine!

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miffy900 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To be fair, work on Swift began in 2010, which would technically predate Tim Cook's accession to the position of CEO by a year or so.

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mdasen 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I definitely agree with the first point - it's not meant to be the best.

On the second part, I think the big thing was that they needed something that would interop with Objective-C well and that's not something that any language was going to do if Apple didn't make it. Swift gave Apple something that software engineers would like a ton more than Objective-C.

I think it's also important to remember that in 2010/2014 (when swift started and when it was released), the ecosystem was a lot different. Oracle v Google was still going on and wasn't finished until 2021. So Java really wasn't on the table. Kotlin hit 1.0 in 2016 and really wasn't at a stage to be used when Apple was creating Swift. Rust was still undergoing massive changes.

And a big part of it was simply that they wanted something that would be an easy transition from Objective-C without requiring a lot of bridging or wrappers. Swift accomplished that, but it also meant that a lot of decisions around Swift were made to accommodate Apple, not things that might be generally useful to the lager community.

All languages have this to an extent. For example, Go uses a non-copying GC because Google wanted it to work with their existing C++ code more easily. Copying GCs are hard to get 100% correct when you're dealing with an outside runtime that doesn't expect things to be moved around in memory. This decision probably isn't what would be the best for most of the non-Google community, but it's also something that could be reconsidered in the future since it's an implementation detail rather than a language detail.

I'm not sure any non-Apple language would have bent over backwards to accommodate Objective-C. But also, what would Apple have chosen circa-2010 when work on Swift started? Go was (and to an extent still is) "we only do things these three Googlers think is a good idea", Go was basically brand-new at the time, and even today Go doesn't really have a UI framework. Kotlin hadn't been released when work started on Swift. C# was still closed source. Rust hadn't appeared yet and was still undergoing a lot of big changes through Swift's release. Python and other dynamic languages weren't going to fit the bill. There really wasn't anything that existed then which could have been used instead of Swift. Maybe D could have been used.

But also, is Swift bad? I think that some of the type inference stuff that makes compiles slow is genuinely a bad choice and I think the language could have used a little more editing, but it's pretty good. What's better that doesn't come with a garbage collector? I think Rust's borrow checker would have pissed off way too many people. I think Apple needed a language without a garbage collector for their desktop OS and it's also meant better battery life and lower RAM usage on mobile.

If you're looking for a language that doesn't have a garbage collector, what's better? Heck, what's even available? Zig is nice, but you're kinda doing manual memory management. I like Rust, but it's a much steeper learning curve than most languages. There's Nim, but its ARC-style system came 5+ years after Swift's introduction.

So even today and even without Objective-C, it's hard to see a language that would fit what Apple wants: a safe, non-GC language that doesn't require Rust-style stuff.

	▲	cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		To add to this, whatever was to become Obj-C's successor needed to be just as or more well-suited for UI programming with AppKit/UIKit as Obj-C was. That alone narrows the list of candidates a lot.
	▲	kgeist 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		>For example, Go uses a non-copying GC because Google wanted it to work with their existing C++ code more easily. Copying GCs are hard to get 100% correct when you're dealing with an outside runtime that doesn't expect things to be moved around in memory. Do you have a source for this? C# has a copying GC, and easy interop with C has always been one of its strengths. From the perspective of the user, all you need to do is to "pin" a pointer to a GC-allocated object before you access it from C so that the collector avoids moving it. I always thought it had more to do with making the implementation simpler during the early stages of development, with the possibility of making it a copying GC some time in the feature (mentioned somewhere in stdlib's sources I think) but it never came to fruition because Go's non-copying GC was fast enough and a lot of code has since been written with the assumption that memory never moves. Adding a copying GC today would probaby break a lot of existing code.
	▲	stephc_int13 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think that their culture of trying to invent their own standards is generally bad, but it is even worse when it is a programming language. I believe they are painting themselves into a corner.

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7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]