Is it important to learn new things, beyond iOS development?
Recorded – watch the full episode on YouTube.
Do you think it's important for Swift developers to reach out beyond the walled garden of Apple and dabble around in C++, C, Python, Rust, Haskell, and so on?
Mayuko Inoue: I think it's interesting because Apple is that closed ecosystem where Apple literally takes you by the neck and they're like, “use our stuff or else." But then there's so many other things that are happening outside of the world of iOS development. And I think, especially after I have stopped being a professional iOS developer, I realized there's a whole lot out there. And there is a lot of movement going on. And at the end of the day, technology as a whole is allowing humanity and society to move forward in some way by unlocking certain patterns or technologies or by inventing the newest chip that allows us to process so much data in a lesser amount of time each year kind of stuff.
"I think good things can happen when you venture out. That's why we travel. That's why we don't eat the same food every day. It's good to explore and see what possibilities are out there in the world."
And so I think, as an iOS developer, a lot of us are focused on really going deep with an Apple architecture because it's a deep world. You go for miles and miles and ages and ages to figure out what's going on there. But I do think there is something to be said about peeking outside of your own world a little bit. Going to a different country and seeing how things are done there and bringing some of those ideas back into our community because that's when iOS development thrives. I think that's when any technology thrives, when you can borrow ideas and be inspired by other patterns and see how this can help fix the current problems that we have or help unlock potential that we've never been able to before.
Paul Hudson: I think, particularly, I remember reading about SwiftUI in the very early days and someone saying, "It's brilliant. It's all pure Swift and completely JavaScript-free." I'm like, well, yeah, there's no JavaScript in the language, but if you want to tell me that SwiftUI is not somehow inspired by React, by the JavaScript community that's been doing all the work for this foundation, it just doesn't make sense. We learn so much from these other communities and they're happy to let us steal stuff. They're not saying, “oh, yeah, you can't use declarative programming.” It's everyone saying, “take our ideas and put in your ideas." We share it around and we all grow together, you know?
"When you can borrow ideas and be inspired by other patterns and see how this can help fix the current problems that we have or help unlock potential that we've never been able to before."
Mayuko Inoue: 100%. I would almost venture to say, and this is me, I'm nowhere near as expert in Swift as you are. I'm not even sure we would have Swift if we hadn't looked outside of our little world garden before. We might've just been okay with Objective-C, but we've seen easier to read, easier to understand functional programming languages, and we're like, things could be better.
I feel like that's where Swift came and now it's so much easier. We're all in this Swift world. We're not looking back at all. And so yeah, I think good things can happen when you venture out. That's why we travel. That's why we don't eat the same food every day. It's good to explore and see what possibilities are out there in the world.
Paul Hudson: It's not scary, folks, go out there and explore. There is, believe it or not, more out there than just Apple. Even Swift itself, let's not forget, is written in C++. They're not using Swift itself.
This transcript was recorded as part of Swiftly Speaking. You can watch the full original episode on YouTube, or subscribe to the audio version on Apple Podcasts.
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