[brigandish]

XCode (and hence most of the useful parts of using the Apple development ecosystem) as of v11.4 won't install on Macs running Mojave it's actually better, in my view, to use Mono/C# and things like Xamarin than start off with Swift and think you can port the other way and not be forced into upgrading your laptop for the privilege of writing apps for Apple systems.

[chiefsucker]

It may be tempting to go the middleware route, but whenever I worked with middleware I had completely unrelated issues to the underlying framework which either complicated matters, or made it impossible to fix specific bugs. Then there’s the issue that Apple has a pretty aggressive release schedule. For a middleware maintainer it takes pretty long (compared to Apple’s native solutions) to adapt to these changes (I’m thinking about things like the notch on the iPhone X and safe areas). Apple’s secrecy about their upcoming release schedules doesn’t help, but it’s just how things are.

And just a minor nitpick, Apple’s development environment is called Xcode, where just the X is written uppercase.

[zelly]

You can still get around this because it's still possible to run Hackintosh in a VM.

[brigandish]

Okay, but surely that's a workaround for devs who are primarily on non-Mac systems who want to use native features for Mac. What's the win with Swift if I'm developing on Windows over using, say, C# and benefitting from all the support for my primary base and then using something like Xamarin.

I'm on a Mac already (Macbook with 10.14) - am I really going to have to run a VM because of a point release? (That goes for both the OS and Xcode so that's even more absurd)

The standard of their laptops is not good enough any more for me to justify the continued and continuous upgrades. Maybe access to their market would be but I'd need an existing set of customers to justify it, else Visual Studio et al look just as juicy.

[zapzupnz]

> because of a point release

The second set of digits represents major releases. The third set represents point releases.

macOS has been out, using this versioning scheme for a little over 20 years. Don't belittle the work between major releases just because the first set of digits hasn't changed.

Windows Vista through Windows 8.1 are all 6.x, but nobody would claim that Vista and its service packs, 7 and its service pack, and the 8 family are minor upgrades — there were some colossal technical changes under the hood between each, especially regarding security and device drivers.

Same thing for major releases of macOS, even if the user-facing stuff doesn't appear to be all that different.

Also, if your machine supports 10.14, it supports 10.15. The last MacBook Pro that dropped support for anything more recent came out in 2011. Nobody's asking you to buy a new laptop.

[brigandish]

> The second set of digits represents major releases. The third set represents point releases.

It's called being facetious. Regardless, Xcode definitely does not use the 2nd digit for major releases[1], which does require 10.15.

> Windows Vista…

Completely irrelevant.

> Also, if your machine supports 10.14, it supports 10.15. The last MacBook Pro that dropped support for anything more recent came out in 2011.

Yeah, the reality for my machine is that the upgrade did not take, which is funny considering I only tried to upgrade because of the Xcode requirements.

> Nobody's asking you to buy a new laptop.

They sell hardware. If you think they introduce breaking changes to the operating system tied to the hardware because of necessity then I have a bridge to sell you.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcode#Xcode_11.x_(since_SwiftU...

[zapzupnz]

> It's called being facetious

Then stop being facetious. It wasn't clear you were being facetious, anyway.

> Completely irrelevant

No, it isn't, not to the point I was making. You also don't get to decide what's relevant to a point someone else is making.

The point is that Vista's version number is 6.0, 7's was 6.1, 8's was 6.2, and 8.1's was 6.3. All seemingly minor version number bumps, all major releases.

> Yeah, the reality for my machine is that the upgrade did not take

That's unfortunate — but nobody else's problem. If you have a capable machine, harping on about ...

> They sell hardware

... doesn't really stand. They may be selling hardware — but you don't have to buy any.

[brigandish]

Personally, I try to read in a charitable way by assuming that the person writing isn't being robotic - we may (most of us here) be techies but we're still human. I enjoy the wit of others, especially served wry.

Now, to versioning. There is no one standard for versioning. Again, we're mainly techies here, we know this (I hope). I like semver[1] (though I'm having doubts[2]), some prefer calver[3], others use versions as branding[4] (which extends beyond computing). Hence, the choice of version scheme chosen by another organisation or project has no relevance to any other project, their being in the same category or field or competing or whatever simply have no more relevance to this subject than Ford Escort MkII moving to MkIII.

If you're into recursion you might also try applying you "who gets to choose the relevance" logic beyond your own comments, it'll be enlightening.

Finally, if you're going to suggest that all X are capable of something but ignore exceptions to that to me smacks of dogmatism, and more importantly, of no help whatsoever to the person you're responding to.

If you have something helpful or insightful for me then please respond with that, else you can comment further up the thread with your thoughts about versioning and how a hardware company that has been fined for planned obsolescence via software updates[5] isn't angling for more purchases when it stops its dev environment being backwards compatible so it can support a half finished UI library.

[1] https://semver.org/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk A fascinating talk by Rich Hickey where he questions semver and the way we handle change as developers.

[3] https://calver.org/

[4] https://hbr.org/2011/05/the-best-way-to-name-your-product-20 It's interesting, they did lab tests:

> In laboratory and field studies involving hundreds of subjects, we found that when consumers see a brand-name continuation, they expect improvements to existing features. When they see a brand-name change, they expect fundamentally new features, and they perceive the product as riskier (likelier to fail or more prone to compatibility problems with previous products) but potentially more rewarding (higher in quality, more satisfying to use).

If OS X to macOS isn't a brand name change then what's the point (pun intended) of the 10?

[5] https://www.itworld.com/article/3316958/apple-and-samsung-fi... I got a free battery out of this one, perhaps I shouldn't complain? (wry humour alert;)

Edit: I managed to muck up the numbering. Is Markdown capable of off-by-one errors? I can make it happen.

[lioeters]

> The standard of their laptops is not good enough any more

I'm with you on this. When I upgraded my 2015 MBP (or was it 2013?), I was still able to manually install new memory and SSD. Since then, newer MacBooks are not user-extensible, from what I hear, with sealed parts. They have a touchbar instead of function keys or escape (!), the keyboard quality is questionable, and there's no standard headphone jack. macOS has seen unstable releases with poor QA, with one bug bricking the machine.

In addition to those issues, I've been disappointed with Apple's stance and decisions about their proprietary operating system. I guess I've known all along, but it's become glaring. In newer versions I've noticed dark patterns, like being unable to set a different browser than Safari as the default application to open certain file extensions.

> the privilege of writing apps for Apple

This summarizes my feeling. Especially compared to what Microsoft has been pouring efforts into open-source, the way Apple is treating their long-time fans is luke warm at best, hostile at worst.

That's why, as excited I am about the potential of Swift as a cross-platform language, unless companies other than Apple are behind it, I won't be comfortable investing time into it.

[dep_b]

There are other editors for Swift out there, like AppCode. I do hate the fact that I'm forced to upgrade to a new OS version somewhere within half a year. Cataline was barely tolerable when I had to jump to it.

[ken]

Xcode isn't just an editor. AppCode doesn't provide its own compiler and stdlib.