On Dynamism

I’ve kept my hat out of the discussions of Swift vs. Objective-C for several reasons, but the main one is that frankly, I’ve been busy. I ship a product, one that I would consider successful, and recently shipped a major release. What does that mean? It means that debating these types of issues and playing with the latest thing is a luxury. Because I have a shipping product with a lot of users, I can’t just change things unless I find that it adds value to my users. My job is to solve my users’ problems. Now that I have a little bit of time to do so, this is one lens I’m hoping to add to this discussion

In addition, years ago, when Java was introduced, I jumped on that bandwagon, leaving behind Objective-C. It started out writing replacements for Foundation and AppKit in Java and ended with writing large scale servers. I was on that wagon for a good 10 years before returning, so I wasn’t a tourist there. This is yet another lens I also want to add to the discussion as history seems to be repeating itself and many younger people seem to be missing out on this part.

But let’s start with the current issue about dynamism since that’s the hot topic.

One thing many people seem to overlook about the dynamism of Objective-C is that it enabled NeXT (and Apple) to provide better GUI tools. Using dynamism, they were able to make GUI building declarative in nature. Connect this to that. Call this method. All stored in a file that was (and still is) data, not code. Competitors at the time (and today) resorted to code generation which is fragile and, ironically, unsafe. Yes, you could have a more declarative file format, but implementing that in using a static language required a lot of hard-coding and switch statements. Not the elegance that many people claim to be moving towards.

I’m not saying that a language has to be purely dynamic but it shouldn’t be purely static either. It think it’s spurious not to credit a level of dynamism for the quality of apps on Apple platforms over the years, and to be pedantic, the NeXT ones as well – many of which were considered the best on any platform at the time. To deny that, I feel, shows a lack of understanding of what has made the platform great all these years.

Moving from a dynamic language to a more static one seems refreshing at first. I went through the exact same thing when switching to Java. Yes, I can hear some of you grumbling “Java” out there but the irony is that there are more similarities in the evolution between Java and Swift than you may want to admit.

Everything seemed so much “tighter” in Java. Interfaces (Java’s version of protocols) everywhere! No more pointers! Checked exceptions! It’s all so new and exciting. You might just have to take my word on this, but any new language that you really like will always seem to make you “more productive”. A colleague and I (plus maybe one, or one and a half, devs who were on the periphery) implemented our own version of Foundation and AppKit in what I would consider a pretty short amount of time. Other people at Lighthouse can correct me on this but my recollection was that it was on the scale of months, not years. You can read up more on it here.

Was it the language? At the time we might say yes but in hindsight, I’d say it was just that we were just super excited and into the project. I was working with an exceptional team and being a new platform, we were excited about making our mark on it. Yeah, there were bits about Java that were better than Objective-C. But there were bits that were worse. The point here, though, is that until the honeymoon is over and you are maintaining a project over several years, it’s hard to make real proclamations about productivity. Truth be told, I’d say the biggest impact on software quality and productivity is the quality of engineers regardless of any other factors.

Looking back on my years with Java, I find the biggest problems with the platform was this idea that everything can be done by the compiler. It sounds great on paper but when implemented, it resulted in all sorts of contortions to work around not letting any dynamism in. It resulted in a lot of glue being written that I wouldn’t have to write in a more dynamic platform. It resulted in cascading changes across code to make trivial modifications just to appease the compiler. Maybe in a future post I’ll go into specific language features that I found problematic and show parallel trends/features in Swift but let’s just say that less is more. It’s an aesthetic that I always felt that put Apple above the rest and something which I feel like in some ways is being abandoned.

Now, I’m sure many of you will just paint me as an old, stubborn Obj-C luddite. And it’s true on some level but that doesn’t mean you should discount my experience. Many of us old fogeys are working on products that have shipped for years. That means that (1) we are solving user problems (2) have immense experience with doing app development (3) really understanding the frameworks (4) have been maintaining a code base.

Let’s go through these points:

1. We are solving user problems.

We have real problems to solve for people outside of ourselves. We need to be practical to survive. Users don’t care about the tech underneath. We have to ship them solutions. This oftentimes requires rapid response. This also oftentimes involves working around Apple bugs, bugs that never get fixed and will only grow in number as Apple maintains their yearly release schedule (something to think about for proponents of the “final” keyword). Agility and flexibility are paramount here. Reality is not pretty. The user could care less how beautiful your code is if you aren’t solving their problems.

2. We have immense experience with doing app development

I want to emphasize the “app” part of that. A common argument for very strict type safety are for cases which aren’t apps. The predominant software in the Apple ecosystem is end user applications. Let’s try and not lose focus here and argue the case for categories of software that aren’t Apple’s forte. If you are writing some life-critical software on an Apple platform, god help you. Even with Swift, you are stuck with Xcode and Apple’s insistence on yearly new OS releases.

3. We really understand the frameworks

I would take many of the arguments for Swift more seriously if there weren’t strawman examples set up on the Obj-C side. You’ll have to dig up Brent Simmons’ posts on this, but when I see the kooky examples of horrible old Obj-C way, what it tells me is more that you don’t understand the frameworks. It resembles informercials where people are fumbling opening a jar and then are presented with some useless gadget to solve a non-existent problem. I’m sure things can be done better than they are now but providing bad examples indicating ignorance of what it is you are trying to replace doesn’t help your argument. And I have seen plenty of examples of new people replacing what they don’t understand. Please don’t be one of those people.

4. We have been maintaining a code base for a while

I have been writing Hazel for ten years. Many of us old-time app developers are in similar positions. Speaking with many other devs, most of whom write iOS apps, I’d be lucky to find those that have maintained a code base for a third of that time. Sure, there are parts of the code that are ugly, but that happens on any platform. Same thing happened on Java. No matter what you do, time is always against you. When I was working with Java, I found the technical debt grew in a different fashion. It was hard to change anything. This was because changes in stricter languages tended to cascade. Because everything has to declare everything about itself, changing code turns into a Facebook feed, except where you and everyone else are obligated to respond to every stupid pic and forward of Snopes-bait. With a more dynamic code base, I can say I have less code to maintain and that I can be more agile. Not that it’s without it’s own problems. But let’s not act like type-safety is a panacea.

And to give more of my personal perspective on the language debate, I’d love to have something better than Objective-C. But I’d also like to have something better than Swift. My personal pet peeve is that we are in the 21st century and we still have to give a shit about the storage type of numbers. I’d be happy to get rid of scalar primitives entirely.

Ultimately, though, I need something that solves my problems. My problems aren’t performance. They aren’t type-safety (maybe it’s just me, but I rarely have issues with it and when I do, the time it takes to fix it is far less than the time specifying everything to a tee everywhere else). They aren’t being able to write clever VDLs. For me, it’s writing apps that solve my users’ problems and getting them out in a timely fashion. As it stands now, Swift (at least pure-Swift, or even current Swift as a non-ABI-stable moving target) does not do that for me.

Now maybe these same problems can be solved in a static way but what I’m not seeing from the static-camp are (decent) solutions. What I’m seeing are either hand-waving or the same crufty code-generation, write tons of repetitive boilerplate type of solutions that I had hoped we had left behind in the 90s.

What I do see makes me worry that it’s not the experienced app-writers that are being heard. Unfortunately, many of us are too busy to sit in the various mailing lists and forums. Yes, ok, we lose. But we all lose if those creating the platform don’t draw from the experience of those who have built upon it successfully. As someone who has done both (write frameworks and apps) and seen what happens when the former ignore the latter (the rise and fall of Java), I’m hoping history doesn’t repeat itself.

That’s my somewhat meandering brain dump for the moment as I do have to get back to working on my next patch. Sure, these are just my opinions but my hope is that we can at least look for more balance in our approaches to solving actual problems.