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by carlosrg 1791 days ago
> Meanwhile Google is moving the goalposts of "modern" web development so fast that it's nearly impossible for anyone to keep up.

For a second I thought you were talking about Apple’s UI frameworks and languages, with all the different Swift versions over the last couple of years and different UI frameworks like Cocoa, Catalyst, and SwiftUI, deprecation of OpenGL and introduction of their own graphics API, etc.
2 comments
mrtksn 1791 days ago
That's a stretch. If anything, Apple is too conservative.

The UIKit was the only UI framework from 2007-2019. Then SwiftUI came and they both work very well together. As other frameworks come for stuff like graphics or device features, they don't really replace each other but stack up. On desktop, it's a similar situation.

How is the situation with the web technologies? What was the hip tech in 2007? AJAX? JQuery? What about 5 years ago? AngularJS? Meteor? Bootstarp? what about now? Is it ReactJS or Vue? What about tomorrow? Is it Svelte?

They all arrange Div's in the DOM but it's different framework each month.

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lyaa 1791 days ago
What has the choice of a framework got to do with browsers?

No one is forcing you to use them. HTML and CSS still work perfectly fine, let the people with curiosity and energy experiment. Nothing is stopping you from using browser APIs with any code you want.

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carlosrg 1791 days ago
You can still use jQuery or plain vanilla HTML+CSS+JavaScript, and you still have access to any web technology out there. Websites written in 1999 will continue to render perfectly. Nobody will deprecate WebGL for example. Nobody forces you to learn a new framework, although the documentation for most of those is actually good unlike Apple’s.

Meanwhile for example you can’t use the latest iOS 15 API (SharePlay) without using Swift, and you need to learn a new half-baked declarative UI API called SwiftUI to write your own widgets. And let’s not talk about trying to run a 1999 executable today.

They all arrange pixels on the screen but it’s a different framework each month.

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mrtksn 1791 days ago
It's more like every decede but fair enough. If you really want, you can simply use C.
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marcellus23 1791 days ago
Uh, what? The UI framework story is pretty simple.

There used to be frameworks specific to each platform (AppKit, UIKit, WatchKit...). SwiftUI replaces those with a cross-platform solution, but it's not all there yet.

Catalyst is basically a sort of stop-gap to let devs easily convert Cocoa Touch apps for Mac.

Long-term, SwiftUI is the only thing that will matter.

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