Marco.org

Ed Finkler:

I find myself more and more concerned about my future as a developer. …

My tolerance for learning curves grows smaller every day. New technologies, once exciting for the sake of newness, now seem like hassles. I’m less and less tolerant of hokey marketing filled with superlatives. I value stability and clarity.

Read the whole thing. It’s tempting to quote it all.

I feel the same way, and it’s one of the reasons I’ve lost almost all interest in being a web developer. The client-side app world is much more stable, favoring deep knowledge of infrequent changes over the constant barrage of new, not necessarily better but at least different technologies, libraries, frameworks, techniques, and methodologies that burden professional web development.

I even get some of this feeling with Swift so far. I’m about to ship Overcast, a sizable, complex Objective-C app that I’ve been writing for nearly two years with a huge variety of code, from high-level interfaces to low-level audio handling.

Swift looks interesting, but in all of Overcast’s development so far, I’ve never run into a problem that’s the language’s fault that Swift would have handled better. It appears to solve problems I don’t have, to gain small (and still theoretical) optimizations that I don’t need, at the expense of many Objective-C features I really like.

I don’t even know if Swift saves a lot of complexity, as it promises: its code appears smaller, but it’s far more dense, which is deceiving. Simpler code is great, but less code that isn’t actually simpler doesn’t inherently help — it’s just harder to read, harder to learn, and more prone to hard-to-see bugs. Most Swift code samples I’ve seen haven’t been much simpler than Objective-C equivalents — just shorter.

But I haven’t given it a deep look yet, so this all could just be the out-of-touch ramblings of a 32-year-old who’s already tired of learning new languages without a compelling reason.