Recently on the Swift Forums, someone complained that putting Swift in the OS has only made things worse for developers. My immediate reaction is a snarky “welcome to the world of libraries shipped with the OS”, but that’s not helpful and also doesn’t refute their point. So here’s a blog post that talks about how we got where we did, covering time when I worked on Swift at Apple. But I’m going to have to start a lot earlier to explain the problem…
Leaving Apple
After seven years, I’m leaving Apple. Today (November 1) is my last day in office.
Those seven years have been good for me. I started off on the Clang Static Analyzer, and eventually moved onto the secret project that became Swift. As someone interested in programming languages and compilers, Swift was…I don’t want to say the chance of a lifetime, but maybe the chance of a decade, at least. I got to shape and contribute to a language used by people all over the world during its early years, and it’s been a heck of an experience. To everyone in the Swift community, thank you and also I’m sorry for the bugs.
Big News
I’m going to Apple.
This is not as exciting for me as it would be for someone else. I actually grew up in Cupertino, and I’ve interned there a few summers ago. I have a lot of respect for Apple’s emphasis on design and quality in their products (there are always exceptions, but the general trend is very good), but I haven’t been dying to work there the way some people might.
What is exciting is what I’ll be doing. As I mentioned a few weeks back, I’ve shifted away from Cocoa development and gotten involved with Clang.