Brent Simmons on SwiftUI
Brent Simmon’s piece, The NeXT Era Ends, the Swift Era Begins:
Though I don’t discount Catalyst’s usefulness — we will get lots of apps new to the Mac — the real news this week was about SwiftUI and the Combine framework. This, finally, is a new way of writing apps, and it’s based on Swift and not on Objective-C. It’s very much not from NeXT.
It’s early. It has bugs. It’s not nearly complete. Sure. But it’s also how we’re going to write apps in the future.
And it’s mind-blowing. Apple’s marketing for this year’s WWDC had it right.
It may be a while before you’re running apps that use SwiftUI and Combine (and who knows what else still to come). We’re in a transition, and transitions take years. But we’ve all just had a glimpse of the next 20 years.
Leading up to WWDC, I wrote: “Developers got more functionality for free when they used Cocoa.” It’s no coincidence that Craig Federighi introduced SwiftUI by emphasizing that it means writing less code. If you want to try to introduce something revolutionary, it’s good a good idea to have an objective reason that it’s better; less code is always objectively better.