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by flippy_flops 853 days ago
After years of obj-c I wrote a rather larger app on Swift 1.1. I'll never forget the pain of upgrading to each new version of Swift. And my god, the pain of early swift string manipulation. 100% technical debt annually.
2 comments

If there’s one lesson to take from Swift 1 and 2, it’s that Apple is comfortable launching beta APIs that can undergo massive churn. It’s why I avoided SwiftUI for the first few years, and now why people would be wise to do the same for SwiftData.
Same with Google. When they announced that Compose was now "stable" I laughed out loud and said "they just slapped a 1.0 version on it, didn't they?". And yes they did. We're a lot of releases later and it's still no fun to debug weird-ass issues. Last week I had two textfields, and both of them had focus at the same time!
> Apple is comfortable launching beta APIs that can undergo massive churn

You see this as a consumer, too. Apple very much moves on from old hardware compared to Microsoft.

Honest question: what exactly did you expect when adopting a brand new language? Apple were explicit that they would make breaking changes. Besides, would you rather be stuck with Swift 1 forever? It was pretty meagre in retrospect.