Predictions in the Apple-sphere
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
Comments: 22 (latest 4 hours later)
Tagged: apple, ios, macos, ipad, apple vision pro, backwards compatibility, ui, swift, ai, llms
A couple of months ago, I wrote:
[...] It may become impossible to launch a new programming language. No corpus of training data in the coding AI assistant; new developers don't want to use it because their assistant can't offer help; no critical mass of new users; language dies on the vine. --@zarfeblong, March 28
I was replying to a comment by Charlie Stross, who noted that LLMs are trained on existing data and therefore are biased against recognizing new phenomena. My point was that in tech, we look forward to learning about new inventions -- new phenomena by definition. Are AI coding tools going to roadblock that?
Already happening! Here's Kyle Hughes last week:
At work I’m developing a new iOS app on a small team alongside a small Android team doing the same. We are getting lapped to an unfathomable degree because of how productive they are with Kotlin, Compose, and Cursor. They are able to support all the way back to Android 10 (2019) with the latest features; we are targeting iOS 16 (2022) and have to make huge sacrifices (e.g Observable, parameter packs in generics on types). Swift 6 makes a mockery of LLMs. It is almost untenable.
[...] To be clear, I’m not part of the Anti Swift 6 brigade, nor aligned with the Swift Is Getting Too Complicated party. I can embed my intent into the code I write more than ever and I look forward to it becoming even more expressive.
I am just struck by the unfortunate timing with the rise of LLMs. There has never been a worse time in the history of computers to launch, and require, fundamental and sweeping changes to languages and frameworks. --@kyle, June 1 (thread)
That's not even a new language, it's just a new major version. Is C++26 going to run into the same problem?
Hat tip to John Gruber, who quotes more dev comments as we swing into WWDC week.