Jacob’s Tech Tavern

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2024-10-28 17:30:09

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Today, we’re going to learn how modern programming languages are governed. I’ll explain how Swift’s dictatorial structure is uniquely terrible, and demonstrate to you how bad the situation has become.

Swift was the passion project of Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM and senior director of dev tooling at Apple. Across evenings and weekends in the early 2010s, he wrote the foundations of the language we know and love today.

Apple’s senior leadership team was packed to the gills with the OG NeXT crew, all on first-name terms with Jobs, who built their careers on Objective-C. It took a lot of internal politicking to get the green-light for Swift.

In classic Apple secrecy, prior to the WWDC 2014 announcement, only 250 internal employees even knew about the project that would eventually make their codebases obsolete.