SwiftUI's Deeper Problem ➹

I watched the video this post is based on a while back, and although I agree with much of it, I don’t think the underlying problem is that Swift is bad or that SwiftUI has gaps–which it does. Cocoa and Objective-C were a very tough act to follow: they gave developers a clear, stable way to evolve applications over many years, whereas most of the decade of Swift I was exposed to failed to provide anything equally dependable.

The constant language and framework churn meant examples aged badly, working code kept acquiring caveats and the path between Apple’s preferred approaches never felt particularly safe. In practice, I was only really able to use Swift for CLI tools–where the UI churn did not matter–until AI could sort through the version-specific mess and iterate for me. SwiftUI may well be mediocre, but the deeper failure is that Apple’s developer platform stopped making application evolution feel predictable.