SwiftUI is not great in any sense, other than looking great to people who've never written non-trivial software. When your criteria for 'great' is whatever 'content creators', 'software journalists' (email newsletter 'creators') and apple's marketing team pump out this week, 'great' is anything a marketing firm puts dollars behind that seems 'cool' and 'fresh' and 'hip', or is it 'dope' this week?
It is quintessential form over substance - like Apple's fucking 'butterfly' keyboards.
SwiftUI is butterfly keyboards of software - wait until you want to write non-toy code with it, you'll be needing 'hack #235 by content creator #563' to make trivial features possible.
I've actively made an effort to learn SwiftUI this week so I can write my software quicker. I don't want to spend hours on displaying some styled list in my apps, that should be done in a few minutes. SwiftUI allows for that. Once all the bugs are gone, that is. So far, I've spent a lot of time on SwiftUI's bugs. Luckily, you can always dive down to UIKit if all else fails.
SwiftUI brings concepts from React and Flutter to the Apple ecosystem, which is great. It's especially great for people writing non-trivial software, because we don't want to spend our time on doing trivial stuff.
Ah, we are so lucky to have a framework full of language features that only it uses and an ability to drop down and learn a whole other suite of frameworks that work completely differently to achieve the same task!
I've been so lucky to have to learn near a dozen programming languages in the span of less than a decade to write CRUD apps that appear on screens and do the same thing on each platform slightly differently.
I only hope to be more lucky in the decades to come, maybe I'll have to learn two dozen new languages and three dozen new frameworks to write CRUD apps that show up on computer screens.
I am 'doing' real software - I saved up my money writing CRUD and quit as soon as I could afford to.
What I am personally doing in no way negates the fragmentation that is present. SwiftUI is the latest contributor to never-ending CRUD hell and I am merely informing the young and impressionable, that SwiftUI is not your friend - it is your anti-cross-platform, proprietary, closed source devil spawn (being dramatic for fun :)) and if you ever want to start solving real world problems instead of learning the latest framework that does what we did 20 years ago but 5% better this time, you better listen real careful to annoying debby-downers like me, Joe Armstrong (RIP), Rich Hickey etc who got fed up with the corporate matrix and went a different way.
I had the pleasure to attend a talk given by Joe Armstrong. For some reason he was always looking over to Phil Wadler, apparently looking for approving nods, but there were none to be found :-)
I hear what you are saying. I also find it unfortunate that something simple like UI is so fragmented. But then again, maybe UI is not so simple after all. The current paradigm that SwiftUI copies and evolves is that of React, and it just didn't exist 20 years ago. Funny also that this new paradigm was invented for the web first. While a lot of web stuff is crappy indeed, this is one of those examples where it produced a superior paradigm that is now copied and evolved outside of web as well, for example by SwiftUI, also by Flutter.
Is it progress, though? If the React paradigm is so much better, you'd expect some kind of UX renaissance stemming from its adoption. Instead, we're still struggling with Electron-based apps that are "prettier" but less productive than what we had 20 years ago, back when they were written in UI frameworks that barely even had any data binding at all.
SwiftUI is “great” for a calculator demo or a to-do list app. Otherwise it’s just a gimmick, but Apple had gotten anxious about ReactNative and had to make something palatable for the webdevs... Although making SwiftUI mandatory for home screen widget extensions is very concerning, and on the long run they’re probably shooting themselves in the foot by pushing this buggy toy framework...
It is quintessential form over substance - like Apple's fucking 'butterfly' keyboards.
SwiftUI is butterfly keyboards of software - wait until you want to write non-toy code with it, you'll be needing 'hack #235 by content creator #563' to make trivial features possible.