Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kenshi 2311 days ago
I suspect Apple knows the developer experience for Swift is terrible (even if the Apple developer community at large is in mass denial about this).

The number 2 item on Swift Core Teams goals for Swift 6 is "Create a fantastic development experience". See: https://forums.swift.org/t/on-the-road-to-swift-6/32862

Whether anyone at Apple cares about documentation any more is another matter. A really sad state of affairs, because once upon a time, Apple had some of the best documentation out there. Of course, that was when they actively needed to court a developer community, and couldn't just announce something half-baked at WWDC and get mass adoption from enthusiastic developers.

2 comments

I don't know, maybe some of the die hards are in denial. I really enjoy the language and the platforms but I'd readily admit it's pretty far behind in terms of DX. I think at this point Apple is going to have to make this a really big priority if they want to remain relevant and it's going to take a lot of effort on their part.
While I certainly can't speak for all diehards, I hear a lot of complaints about the state of Apple's documentation from long-time developers these days. (In my experience, the true Apple diehards are often very critical of the company, but they tend to have specific trenchant critiques.)
Even iOS programming communities will admit you're brave for using SwiftUI right now. It's brand new, has a lot of issues like being completely unable to show you a coherent type-error message (like if you have an error inside a ForEach view).

It's just cutting edge tech.