Apple culture of secrecy claimed to cause Swift lead's exit, but Chris Lattner denies repo...

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  • Reply 41 of 60

    Seriously, these people are paid big bucks and can't keep their mouths shut? Unless talking about your work helps improve the work, there should be no reason to feel constrained. I work in health care and am "constrained" to keep patient health information private. Lawyers can't talk about their clients. Etc.

    I tend to think these people wanted to do something different and, as everyone tends to, they came up with excuses to rationalize the departure.

  • Reply 42 of 60
    canukstormcanukstorm Posts: 2,693member
    mjtomlin said:
    Gotta love when when people comment on unofficial "reports" and start to lay blame where ever they can. 

    I have first hand hand knowledge that Chris was planning on leaving Apple after Swift went open source and was "finished". Which was version 3.0.

    This ridiculousness about secrecy is pure speculation. All of his projects are opened sources. 
    Wasn't ABI Stabilization part of the original Swift 3.0 plan?  If so, then it's not finished.

    Apple’s Chris Lattner, original creator of the Swift language, has recently announced on the Swift Evolution mailing list that ABI stability, one of the goals originally planned for Swift 3, will be postponed.

    In Lattner’s own words:
    Some of the loftier goals that we started out with aren’t going to fit into the release - including some of the most important generics features needed in order to lock down the ABI of the standard library.

    https://www.infoq.com/news/2016/05/swift-3-no-stable-abi

    flaneur said:
    See Gruber's link to a post by Chris Lattner today. I get an impression the situation is much less sinister than this "stifling secrecy" narrative implies.

    http://daringfireball.net/

    On the other hand, industrial secrecy in the software field may be inherently more problematical than in hardware, because software is so mental and therefore more part of our common need as humans to communicate what's on our minds.

    Has anyone here seen any official comment by Apple?  It seems very unusual that Apple wouldn't make some comment!
    Chris Lattner has just responded with a Tweet


  • Reply 43 of 60
    brucemcbrucemc Posts: 1,541member
    I've never been with a single job for more than three years. 
    And I've been, for many more than three years. So what?
    My point is the regular Apple hand-wringers have been all over the interwebs trying to paint this as more DOOM, a Cook failing, yada yada, when the reality is most people don't stay w/ a tech employer for over a decade as these last two guys in the news have. Most people change jobs more frequently. In 17 years of Fortune 100 tech employment I can count on one hand the guys I know who put in a decade w/ one gig.
    Oh, stop with the "hand-wringer" strawmen. I could care less what your "interwebs" say. I am interested in the conversation here. 

    The fact that you've seen something in your career amounts to a hill of beans. Why don't you then explain Cook, Ive, Schiller, Cue, Frederighi, pretty much every board member of Apple, etc. and how much they "...put in w/one gig"? 
    It's not a straw man -- even on AI there are plenty of people in the original story comments who used this as an opportunity to wring their hands over the sign of impending DOOM this surely means.

    Like I said, I work in big tech and a guy staying for over a decade is rare. Citing the very top echelon of executive leadership with their millions upon millions of personal stock investment has very little bearing on the conversation of what is normal. You get that, right?
    Yeah, I "get that."  Not sure you do, if you think people like Cook and Ive are staying on at Apple because they have "millions upon millions of personal stock investment."  That's pure, unmitigated nonsense made up to support your false premise. Please move along...
    You've become a very prickly person on these forums.
    roundaboutnow
  • Reply 44 of 60
    Has anyone here seen any official comment by Apple?  It seems very unusual that Apple wouldn't make some comment!
    Chris Lattner has just responded with a Tweet


    Yeah, but as much as Apple has promoted Swift, it seems a very un-Apple lack of class to ignore Chris' contributions and departure.
  • Reply 45 of 60
    canukstormcanukstorm Posts: 2,693member
    Has anyone here seen any official comment by Apple?  It seems very unusual that Apple wouldn't make some comment!
    Chris Lattner has just responded with a Tweet


    Yeah, but as much as Apple has promoted Swift, it seems a very un-Apple lack of class to ignore Chris' contributions and departure.
    Fair enough. But it was great for Chris to at least clear the air.
  • Reply 46 of 60
    asdasdasdasd Posts: 5,686member

    I suspect that Chris' vision for Swift encompassed almost every level of development/programming at Apple, including:

    • [re]writing Apple's OS APIs (in process)
    • [re]writing the Apple OSes themselves (in process)
    • [re]writing Apple's App offerings (in process)
    • [re]writing Apple's Tool offerings (in process)
    • replacing Apple's low-level and high-level OS Scripting Languages
    • an alternative to Node.js as a server runtime environment
    • an alternative JavaScript as a universal scripting language
    • becoming the language of choice for both client and server programming
    If most of this is true, then Swift Development touched almost every secret project at Apple (and at Apple's partners).  Then, it would be next to impossible for Chris to talk in any detail to anyone about anything!
    Companies like Apple are very slow to rewrite their API layer. New frameworks might eventually use swift. Also the objective c layer can run on Windows - or it used to. 

    As for higher level apps, they mention very few that are full swift. I think the dock in OS X and the WWDC app are examples.

     This might accelerate but while it is ongoing it will temporarily slow down development.
  • Reply 47 of 60
    nhtnht Posts: 4,522member
    mjtomlin said:
    Gotta love when when people comment on unofficial "reports" and start to lay blame where ever they can. 

    I have first hand hand knowledge that Chris was planning on leaving Apple after Swift went open source and was "finished". Which was version 3.0.

    This ridiculousness about secrecy is pure speculation. All of his projects are opened sources. 
    Wasn't ABI Stabilization part of the original Swift 3.0 plan?  If so, then it's not finished.
    Finished languages are dead languages.  Even Ada got a language update in 2012.  C++ in 2014.  FORTRAN in 2010. COBOL 2014.

    In contrast Algol's last update was in 1972.

    Amusingly, while PL/1 hasn't had a language update in a long while, IBM released a new version of their compiler in 2016.

    http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=ca&infotype=an&supplier=897&letternum=ENUS216-185

    Swift was sufficiently developed that he could leave.
  • Reply 48 of 60
    yojimbo007yojimbo007 Posts: 1,165member
    The extreme and in some cases the unreasonable secrecy and opaqueness at Apple is not only (unnecessarily) killing a lot of excitement in the market (ie. riding apple is like a ride in the thick fog... no hints of what to look forward to ....hence the Low PE......) its fragmenting the company to a point where coherent philosophy and approach are seriously comptomised .......where the left hand has no clue what the right hand is doing .. where people are runing around blindly... resulting in fragmentation and inconsitsnsices throughout all finished products... ... software to hardware ... Keep the balance Apple... more ofthen than not extreme behavior is destructive!
  • Reply 49 of 60
    asdasd said:

    I suspect that Chris' vision for Swift encompassed almost every level of development/programming at Apple, including:

    • [re]writing Apple's OS APIs (in process)
    • [re]writing the Apple OSes themselves (in process)
    • [re]writing Apple's App offerings (in process)
    • [re]writing Apple's Tool offerings (in process)
    • replacing Apple's low-level and high-level OS Scripting Languages
    • an alternative to Node.js as a server runtime environment
    • an alternative JavaScript as a universal scripting language
    • becoming the language of choice for both client and server programming
    If most of this is true, then Swift Development touched almost every secret project at Apple (and at Apple's partners).  Then, it would be next to impossible for Chris to talk in any detail to anyone about anything!
    Companies like Apple are very slow to rewrite their API layer. New frameworks might eventually use swift. Also the objective c layer can run on Windows - or it used to. 


    Have a look at this:

    https://realm.io/news/tryswift-chris-robert-end-to-end-application-development-swift-backend/

    It appears that they, Apple (with the help of IBM?) have already [mostly] rewritten Foundation (nary an NS prefix on URL, Date, etc.).  I get the impression from the above video that Apple may be planning to use some contributions from the open-source community (especially IBM) to flesh out new frameworks or avoid rewriting existing ones.

    As for higher level apps, they mention very few that are full swift. I think the dock in OS X and the WWDC app are examples.


    The Swift Playgrounds for iPad app is one.  I suspect that Apple's developers are just hitting their stride with the release of Swift 3.0 -- because it is less likely to break their code in future releases of Swift...  Swift 3.1 is supposed to arrive in the next few weeks -- it should indicate how stable the [existing] language definition is.

     This might accelerate but while it is ongoing it will temporarily slow down development.
    Maybe not so much.  I'm no pro programmer, and I don't understand all I know about Swift...  But from what I read/hear, the pros are singing the praises of Swift because it's concise to write, readable/understandable/maintainable, less error prone/easier to debug, etc.  -- couple that with the fact that it can co-exist with Obj-C, so you can take a modular approach to rewriting existing apps.  That sounds like productivity to me.

    In the first part of the above IBM video, Chris Bailey presents Swift server-side vs Java, Node.js and Ruby.  He illustrates that Swift is a better performer and takes much less memory than the others -- then makes the case that Cloud providers bill based on memory usage.  That could provide incentive to rewrite server code in Swift.

    asdasd
  • Reply 50 of 60
    nht said:
    mjtomlin said:
    Gotta love when when people comment on unofficial "reports" and start to lay blame where ever they can. 

    I have first hand hand knowledge that Chris was planning on leaving Apple after Swift went open source and was "finished". Which was version 3.0.

    This ridiculousness about secrecy is pure speculation. All of his projects are opened sources. 
    Wasn't ABI Stabilization part of the original Swift 3.0 plan?  If so, then it's not finished.
    Finished languages are dead languages.  



    Touché

    Even Ada got a language update in 2012.  C++ in 2014.  FORTRAN in 2010. COBOL 2014.

    In contrast Algol's last update was in 1972.

    Amusingly, while PL/1 hasn't had a language update in a long while, IBM released a new version of their compiler in 2016.

    http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=ca&infotype=an&supplier=897&letternum=ENUS216-185

    I wonder if IBM rewrote PL/I with Swift?  Nah... probably APL.

    From your link:

    The applications created by using Enterprise PL/I can interoperate with IBM CICS®, IBM DB2®, IBM IMS™, and other transactional and data systems.
    Ha! Talk about legacy baggage... When I worked for IBM at the Palo Alto DB/DC Systems Center circa (1973-1979) I supported both:

    CICS:  Constantly Ignore Customer Satisfaction

    IMS: Its Mighty Slow

    Riggins and Berman... wherever are you, now?

    Swift was sufficiently developed that he could leave.

    You're probably right! 
    edited January 2017
  • Reply 51 of 60
    brucemc said:
    I've never been with a single job for more than three years. 
    And I've been, for many more than three years. So what?
    My point is the regular Apple hand-wringers have been all over the interwebs trying to paint this as more DOOM, a Cook failing, yada yada, when the reality is most people don't stay w/ a tech employer for over a decade as these last two guys in the news have. Most people change jobs more frequently. In 17 years of Fortune 100 tech employment I can count on one hand the guys I know who put in a decade w/ one gig.
    Oh, stop with the "hand-wringer" strawmen. I could care less what your "interwebs" say. I am interested in the conversation here. 

    The fact that you've seen something in your career amounts to a hill of beans. Why don't you then explain Cook, Ive, Schiller, Cue, Frederighi, pretty much every board member of Apple, etc. and how much they "...put in w/one gig"? 
    It's not a straw man -- even on AI there are plenty of people in the original story comments who used this as an opportunity to wring their hands over the sign of impending DOOM this surely means.

    Like I said, I work in big tech and a guy staying for over a decade is rare. Citing the very top echelon of executive leadership with their millions upon millions of personal stock investment has very little bearing on the conversation of what is normal. You get that, right?
    Yeah, I "get that."  Not sure you do, if you think people like Cook and Ive are staying on at Apple because they have "millions upon millions of personal stock investment."  That's pure, unmitigated nonsense made up to support your false premise. Please move along...
    You've become a very prickly person on these forums.
    Yeah, I tend to get prickly when people make outlandish statements along the lines of the one I quoted above.... Hey, skip over them if you don't like them (sorry if that sounds prickly too).

    Just part and parcel of being an old fart on this Forum, I guess.
    edited January 2017
  • Reply 52 of 60
    I've never been with a single job for more than three years. 
    I've never been in a job for more than 1 year, and that was a struggle :smile: 
    I'm a contractor, in and out 3 to 6 months tops, then on to the next company.
  • Reply 53 of 60
    I've never been with a single job for more than three years. 
    I've never been in a job for more than 1 year, and that was a struggle :smile: 
    I'm a contractor, in and out 3 to 6 months tops, then on to the next company.
    Even when I was a consultant at Thoughtworks - my stints (which were "on the road" mostly) were 6, 7, 11, 12 months in length (as a independent contractor - longer and rehired for different stints many times).  3 to 6 months max sounds like an effort to make sure that you never have to deal with the consequences of your employment  :)
  • Reply 54 of 60
    croprcropr Posts: 1,122member
    With a few very specific exceptions, Apple's culture of secrecy is key to their success. Whether they're particularly good at that secrecy *today* is beside the point. The reasons for it are understandable.

    Those who don't fit that culture shouldn't stay. It's just that simple. 
    Secrecy is important when you're creating new hardware products (ie: iPhone pre-2007 or Project Titan) but what purpose does stringent secrecy serve once these products are out the door? This article states that not only did Lattner (who was a star employee at Apple) leave but the entire networking team left in 2015. What's more important, being able to hire & retain the best talent or culture of secrecy? There needs to be some balance there somewhere.
    Fully agree.  When one launches a fully new product like the iPhone 10 years ago, secrecy is good.  However product evolution should be much more open, certainly in a business environment.  As owner of a software company, I had to make a decision about a 4 year investment (value 350 K Euro) in July 2016.  As part of this investment I had to buy 7 new workstations. I knew that the Macbook Pro would be upgraded, but I had no clue about features and price.  Eventually I decided to use Ubuntu based Dell XPS
    edited January 2017 avon b7
  • Reply 55 of 60
    asdasdasdasd Posts: 5,686member
    asdasd said:

    I suspect that Chris' vision for Swift encompassed almost every level of development/programming at Apple, including:

    • [re]writing Apple's OS APIs (in process)
    • [re]writing the Apple OSes themselves (in process)
    • [re]writing Apple's App offerings (in process)
    • [re]writing Apple's Tool offerings (in process)
    • replacing Apple's low-level and high-level OS Scripting Languages
    • an alternative to Node.js as a server runtime environment
    • an alternative JavaScript as a universal scripting language
    • becoming the language of choice for both client and server programming
    If most of this is true, then Swift Development touched almost every secret project at Apple (and at Apple's partners).  Then, it would be next to impossible for Chris to talk in any detail to anyone about anything!
    Companies like Apple are very slow to rewrite their API layer. New frameworks might eventually use swift. Also the objective c layer can run on Windows - or it used to. 


    Have a look at this:

    https://realm.io/news/tryswift-chris-robert-end-to-end-application-development-swift-backend/

    It appears that they, Apple (with the help of IBM?) have already [mostly] rewritten Foundation (nary an NS prefix on URL, Date, etc.).  I get the impression from the above video that Apple may be planning to use some contributions from the open-source community (especially IBM) to flesh out new frameworks or avoid rewriting existing ones.

    As for higher level apps, they mention very few that are full swift. I think the dock in OS X and the WWDC app are examples.


    The Swift Playgrounds for iPad app is one.  I suspect that Apple's developers are just hitting their stride with the release of Swift 3.0 -- because it is less likely to break their code in future releases of Swift...  Swift 3.1 is supposed to arrive in the next few weeks -- it should indicate how stable the [existing] language definition is.

     This might accelerate but while it is ongoing it will temporarily slow down development.
    Maybe not so much.  I'm no pro programmer, and I don't understand all I know about Swift...  But from what I read/hear, the pros are singing the praises of Swift because it's concise to write, readable/understandable/maintainable, less error prone/easier to debug, etc.  -- couple that with the fact that it can co-exist with Obj-C, so you can take a modular approach to rewriting existing apps.  That sounds like productivity to me.

    In the first part of the above IBM video, Chris Bailey presents Swift server-side vs Java, Node.js and Ruby.  He illustrates that Swift is a better performer and takes much less memory than the others -- then makes the case that Cloud providers bill based on memory usage.  That could provide incentive to rewrite server code in Swift.

    The IBM links are very interesting thanks. 
  • Reply 56 of 60
    prokip said:
    Are you listening Tim Cook, are you listening??  Steve has gone.  Now work out what areas and products really need secrecy and what areas do not.  Otherwise lose good people who actually give a s**t !!
    Now that you know it was fake news,  and obvious at that (LOL "overly secret" for an open source project!),  what message do you have for Tim Cook?
  • Reply 57 of 60
    mjtomlin said:
    Gotta love when when people comment on unofficial "reports" and start to lay blame where ever they can. 

    I have first hand hand knowledge that Chris was planning on leaving Apple after Swift went open source and was "finished". Which was version 3.0.

    This ridiculousness about secrecy is pure speculation. All of his projects are opened sources. 
    Part of the dumbing down of America.  Schools, especially colleges, no longer teach critical thinking.  Instead, kids are fed a steady stream of politicized "here is what you should think."   Apple insider hasn't yet sunk to the level of MacRumors, but you can see a lot of warning signs in the posts on this topic.  Critical reasoning would have caused folks to first question the credibility of unverified unidentified source, but also questioned the premise that someone being wooed away in the tech industry for a dream type job at another premier tech company was a sufficient basis to conclude there must be a problem."


    On the plus side, kudos to Apple Insider for changing the headline to make it clear it was fake news.  Contrast that with MacRumors where they are still using it for click bait and merely added the words "Update" to the debunked original title.  
  • Reply 58 of 60
    The problem is Apple secures the wrong things. The ones who control secrecy are hiding their incompetence and not protecting the things that made Apple exciting, the product chain. 

    There has been a big exodus over the past few years of talent that made Apple great. The ones who filled their shoes are very lacking in talent. Anybody who works there and uses their internal software knows that's true.  Too many idiots hired from EA and other places have clogged the command chain with people who don't know what they are doing and they use secrecy to cover it up.

    You might remember Scott Forestall was used as a scapegoat for the Maps disaster. Problem was, he wasn't the only one who knew there were problems. He just wasn't liked by Cook, Ive and Federighi, so they used secrecy to get rid of him.

    Apple now uses secrecy as a weapon internally to weed out people they don't like and not to protect their products. If they did BGR and Sonny Dickson would have harder jobs. 
    I am having a hard time understanding this "exodus" you describe. Things change for many reasons. 
    Do you honestly believe the the Forstall mess was not more complicated than you presume? What in your post is not a presumption... 
    edited January 2017
  • Reply 59 of 60
    jmc54jmc54 Posts: 207member
    brucemc said:
    I've never been with a single job for more than three years. 
    And I've been, for many more than three years. So what?
    My point is the regular Apple hand-wringers have been all over the interwebs trying to paint this as more DOOM, a Cook failing, yada yada, when the reality is most people don't stay w/ a tech employer for over a decade as these last two guys in the news have. Most people change jobs more frequently. In 17 years of Fortune 100 tech employment I can count on one hand the guys I know who put in a decade w/ one gig.
    Oh, stop with the "hand-wringer" strawmen. I could care less what your "interwebs" say. I am interested in the conversation here. 

    The fact that you've seen something in your career amounts to a hill of beans. Why don't you then explain Cook, Ive, Schiller, Cue, Frederighi, pretty much every board member of Apple, etc. and how much they "...put in w/one gig"? 
    It's not a straw man -- even on AI there are plenty of people in the original story comments who used this as an opportunity to wring their hands over the sign of impending DOOM this surely means.

    Like I said, I work in big tech and a guy staying for over a decade is rare. Citing the very top echelon of executive leadership with their millions upon millions of personal stock investment has very little bearing on the conversation of what is normal. You get that, right?
    Yeah, I "get that."  Not sure you do, if you think people like Cook and Ive are staying on at Apple because they have "millions upon millions of personal stock investment."  That's pure, unmitigated nonsense made up to support your false premise. Please move along...
    You've become a very prickly person on these forums.
    Yeah, I tend to get prickly when people make outlandish statements along the lines of the one I quoted above.... Hey, skip over them if you don't like them (sorry if that sounds prickly too).

    Just part and parcel of being an old fart on this Forum, I guess.
    Actually miss some of the "old farts" on this forum. Tallest sticks his head in once in a while, B. Frost is long gone! Sure there are others!
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