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.
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.
That's just how progress looks like.