204: You’re Only Stable When You’re Dead
13 Jan 2017The Consumer Reports test, Lattner leaving Apple, and big ideas for macOS.
Episode Description:
- Follow up: Marco and AirDrop
- Mac Progress Quandary 1 2 3
- Consumer Reports test results
- Chris Lattner leaves Apple for Tesla
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show: Blog CMS languages
Sponsored by:
- Betterment: Investing made better.
- HelloFresh: Delicious ingredients you'll love to eat. Simple recipes you'll live to cook. Use code ATP for $35 off your first shipment.
- Squarespace: Build it beautiful. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
Chapters
- Should’ve used AirDrop
- Sponsor: HelloFresh (code ATP)
- Future of the Mac! Again!
- MacBook Pro: Turns out…
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Consumer Reports drama
- Chris Lattner leaving Apple
- Sponsor: Betterment
- Future of Swift
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Blog engines
Should’ve used AirDrop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry for the fish. So long and thanks for all of them. I’m not really, I’m not sorry. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually, I have not gotten a lot of headphone time since their New Year’s show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I actually haven’t even heard the whole the whole New Year’s run yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Once you see the hot dog flying around the room. No
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spoilers. That was a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great year though. I should have said the hot dog bouncing around the room. That’s a reference Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah I know my bell was too far away. Also, it was a terrible reference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A bunch of people wrote in via Twitter and via email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey telling you, you really should have tried Airdrop when you were at, I think it was Tiff’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you were trying to send files around. Now, I will be the first to tell you, I have a comically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad memory, a woefully bad memory, but I could swear you said during the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you had done one of these transfers with AirDrop. Is that not the case or did you cut it? What happened?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did these transfers via AirDrop. However, there’s a couple of limitations with AirDrop. Number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, the iPad has to be there. In the first instance, my father-in-law had handed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me just the card reader with an SD card in it. So that was problem number one. So like the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was not actually nearby. Normally, I am a big AirDrop user. I use AirDrop probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least two or three times a week, usually to send files either from my phone to my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or between me and Tiff. If one of us shoots a really cute video or photo and we want it to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the other person’s photo library, we’ll airdrop it over. It usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does work very well. People who have airdrop troubles who it never works for, my biggest advice to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you is to switch it over to everyone mode. I know it sounds crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In reality, the risk from having it on everyone receive mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems fairly non-existent, unless you’re in a subway car packed full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every day. Maybe people might try to do weird things to you, but I have never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once had an unsolicited airdrop incoming thing, and I’ve had it set to everyone for a very long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, when it’s set to everyone, it works very reliably. When it’s set to contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only, it almost never works. even you know whatever whatever they’re using to match your contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess it doesn’t work for me but and from what I’ve heard from other people it seems like it doesn’t usually work for them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either but the everyone mode is very reliable for me and works all the time and I use it all the time and it’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John to do an airdrop uh to my own computer with my own phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John even with the me card you know like the one that’s marked as like you which I assume is the same on my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and on my mac nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah but if you send it to everyone it works great And what a lot of people might not realize about AirDrop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the implementation of it. Like for a while back, there were certain Macs and things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that couldn’t do it, like certain old models. And people thought that was kind of BS-y, but there was actually a good reason for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Basically what AirDrop does is it uses either a second radio or just like a second mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Wi-Fi radio to basically create a second like private Wi-Fi network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly between the two devices. So even if the two devices that you’re sharing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t even on Wi-Fi, or one of them’s on a Wi-Fi network and the other one isn’t, or they’re on different Wi-Fi networks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirDrop still works, and that’s pretty cool. And it just, it saves a lot of hassle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, big fan of AirDrop here. Keep it on everyone mode if you want it to work and it doesn’t. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you see Marco at WWDC, now you all know what to do. His phone is totally open, you can send him anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it still prompts you to accept things anyway. So like, there is a risk, like, it’ll show you a preview of the picture.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, if somebody wanted to like, send it like a vulgar picture, you would see the preview of it before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying deny. So that I think would be the risk. But so far that has yet to happen to me. I know I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inviting horrible things, but that just doesn’t happen in my everyday life. So maybe during WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week I’ll put it on contacts only and just hope for the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I actually have a fun anecdote about this. This was maybe a year ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t think I ever told this story on the show. I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey returning home from your house, Marco, I’m not 100% sure, but we were certainly up in the New York
⏹️ ▶️ Casey state of mind, if you will. And we were in the Jersey Turnpike, and it was with Declan. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I know the song,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t know what it means. I just wanted to drop some sort of reference so John would love me again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s a losing battle, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It really is. So we’re on our way back home, and we stopped at the Jersey Turnpike,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we stopped at one of those rest stops that’s on the Turnpike, and we went and got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Roy Rogers burger, maybe as Burger King or whatever it was. And we’re sitting there and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s Aaron and Declan and me and I’m eating and somebody comes walking up and I see this out of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey periphery and it looks like this person is intent on talking to me, which is fine but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprising because nobody knows where I am right now. And it was a very nice person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t recall his name and I apologize if this very nice person is listening. But they were very kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and very nice and said, oh my gosh, I just wanted to – well, Are you Casey? I just wanted to introduce myself, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I have to tell you a funny story. I walked in and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was curious if the place had any Wi-Fi. And as I was looking, I noticed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was somebody broadcasting their iPhone’s Wi-Fi and it said Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Liss’s iPhone. And I thought to myself, oh my God, maybe he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. I should have a quick look. What had happened was I was using my iPad in the car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I had personal tethering or personal hotspot, whatever it’s called, on, and I just never bothered turning it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off. And so this very enterprising young man decided, or well, happened to see my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone in the list and then looked around and happened to spot us and came up and said hi, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he was very, very nice and very kind, and it was very funny. But goodness did it ever take me by surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that somebody had, like, from across the room figured out that I was there and came over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with intention to say hi. It was startling in the most flattering way possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and quite funny. So be aware of your personal hotspot and airdrop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, aware of your tendencies because it could get you in trouble. Although that wasn’t trouble
⏹️ ▶️ John for me. So did you rename your phone to VZW Wireless 15678? I should. It’s kind of a shame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can’t edit the Wi-Fi network name. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only thing you could do is like rename your device and then it will take on that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey name. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because wouldn’t it be amazing if our thing was to get thousands of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to change their hotspot name to Casey Lewis’ iPhone? And then you just know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, there’s an ATP fan in the room. But that would be awesome. But you can’t do it on the phone without changing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone’s name to Casey Lewis’ iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So be aware of your airdrop in personal hotspot hygiene.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re sponsored this week by a new sponsor. It’s HelloFresh.
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Future of the Mac! Again!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to HelloFresh for supporting our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we got a series of tweets from Adam Russell and I thought these were really interesting and I’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read them as one contiguous block. The answer to the Mac progress quandary from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John is simple. The Mac is obviously not the future, but you are all legitimately frustrated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the Mac is being functionally deprecated faster than the iPhone and iPad are being empowered.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to argue beyond that right now is pointless. We just need to wait and see what Apple’s does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next. I thought that was a very interesting summary and by and large, I agree with that. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if the Mac is dead or not. We don’t need to cross this bridge for the 95th time, at least not yet anyway, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do agree that while incredible strides are being made on iPhone and iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and iOS in general, I guess I should say it seems like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s more going missing from macOS. It just feels that way. Maybe that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even true. Maybe if we looked at the feature list, maybe we’re crazy. But it certainly feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that way. And so I just thought this was a really interesting point. Any thoughts from you, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, one thing, just again, I don’t want to get too far in the weeds on this because you know we could talk forever about this because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have and usually do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John One idea I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a future episode that we should do after we’ve had a little more time to think about it is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big things are still possible to do and left to do on the desktop? What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big challenges aren’t being solved? Major new directions or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advancements that desktop OSes still could use, and in particular, Mac OS still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could use. There’s some low-hanging fruit here. Obviously, one of them that I mentioned before was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cellular Macs. The reason why there’s no cellular Macs is probably because of all the different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software needs that would be needed for that. And right now you can use things like trip mode Dutch to kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of fake it. Sorry, trip mode dot Helvetica. But it would be so much better if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was OS level awareness of cellular connections which by actually there is but if more things actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used it like in with it with the switch to NSURL session that actually was added in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the API but nothing uses it at least to any meaningful amount on OS 10. You know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or excuse me on Mac OS and sorry Steven. And And so there are areas like that where like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, you know what, cellular Macs would be awesome, but why don’t we have that? Oh, well, it would take a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of work in the OS. Well, there’s a lot of answers like that where the question is like, why don’t we have that? Oh, it would take a lot of work on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS. Why are Mac apps so much harder to develop for iOS programmers than iOS apps? Well, some of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons are good reasons that we’ll stay there forever, but part of it is that AppKit and UIKit are very different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in a lot of ways that they don’t need to be different. Some ways they need to be different, but a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways they don’t and they are for legacy reasons. And so there are major advancements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be made in the frameworks. We could talk about things like the security model of what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they tried to do with sandboxing, which has mostly failed. Mostly, I think, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not enough apps could fit within what the sandbox requirements were, and then they never really added new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sandbox capabilities. But I think with attention and maintenance and iteration, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that model actually could work. I think the assumption that like desktop OS’s are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, quote, the past or are finished, or you know, functionally complete and there’s no more advancement to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be had, I think that’s totally wrong. And you can look at Microsoft just to see, like, even though Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco messes up a lot of things they try, a lot of things they try don’t work out, but a lot of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they try are actually, you could see like, wow, you know what? If Apple tried to do something similar and did a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better job of it, that could be really great. And so, not to mention, not even getting into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like AR and VR, which might be really useful in a general purpose PC OS, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know yet. So there are lots of areas where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC OS development could go with effort. So to say that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac OS is done or finished or PCs are a solved problem, we can move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, is I think incredibly short-sighted.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was looking at these tweets and I think I disagree with every single sentence in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Really? In the entire series of three tweets.
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly in like technical ways, like if you want to get picky, the way you, you know, but yeah, I mean, we talked about it a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot in the past shows, but I mean, I can just start with the last person lessons. I don’t want to go through a blow over with, you know, the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Mac progress quandary, you know, is simple. I don’t first of all, I don’t even know which quandary
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about. Second of all, the answer is never simple. All right. And then the last sentence, skipping over all the stuff in
⏹️ ▶️ John the middle lessons, continuing to argue beyond right now, beyond that right now is pointless. Obviously, I
⏹️ ▶️ John disagree with that. If I thought it was pointless, we wouldn’t talk about it for hours and hours every week. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anyway, I I think we’ve covered all
⏹️ ▶️ John these points, but yes, I guess I agree that we are legitimately frustrated.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the part I agree with. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, tough crowd. I thought it was interesting, if nothing else. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up before we talk about something that’s awesome.
MacBook Pro: Turns out…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Follow up on the MacBook Pro. The more I use it, the more I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The ports still drive me nuts, but the ports drive me nuts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the keyboard arrow key lack of gaps drives me nuts. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far everything else about it I’m actually enjoying. I’ve been running some tests and I’ve been finding,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this might make it into a blog post at some point, I don’t know, but I’ve been running some battery tests because Consumer Reports,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figure if their waiter test counts, maybe I can make my own. And so I made my own kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar one, but that involves a little bit heavier workload, things like periodic Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compilations to periodically peg the CPUs for a few seconds and then go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to normal and to kind of simulate what I do. And what I’m finding so far is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the new one’s battery life is really mediocre, but so was the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. I wrote this post a couple years ago about disabling turbo boost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the effect that it has on battery life. On the previous generation MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had a pretty noticeable effect. It added something like 20% battery life, roughly. A pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big effect. What I’m finding with the new one is by disabling turbo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boost, it does work. You can do it, but the savings are much smaller. There is some savings to be had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but instead of adding an hour, it adds like 20 minutes or a half hour or whatever. Of course, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will depend on what you do, but basically what I’m finding is that the new one’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life, while it does suck, I don’t think it’s actually worse than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco previous one. I think it’s actually very slightly better under load, but very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly worse when used lightly. So it depends on what you’re doing, but for my uses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery life on the new one is actually very slightly better if you really baby it, if you turn off turbo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boost, if you turn off the DGPU uses and various things, you can get it to be better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, I’m kind of enjoying the new MacBook Pro, and it does feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome when you have to move it around and pick it up and stuff. It is noticeably better. So kind of enjoying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. The more I use it, the more I like it, and the more I realize, okay, Intel really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screwed them on progress here, but this is not that bad. some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways, in many ways, and possibly even most ways, it’s better than the old one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Still coming around on the keyboard? I still hate the key switches, but I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel when I use the old one that it’s mushy and horrible. So, again, it’s like I’m ruined.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m in the middle now. I think it’s more of an issue of the reduced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaps between the keys and of the arrow key layout than necessarily the key travel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I tried it briefly in the store, and I can’t emphasize enough, it was super briefly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I felt like it was 80% of my freaking beloved Magic Keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure I’ve talked about this 18 times on the show, but I’ll say it one more time. I love the Magic Keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s my favorite keyboard I’ve ever used ever. I personally am not a mechanical keyboard kind of guy. Maybe you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are. That’s fine. It’s not my cup of tea. I love the Magic Keyboard. I felt like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new MacBook Pro keyboard got me really close, but I wanted just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit more travel on the keys, and then it would have been just perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m a little surprised if you say that the key travel doesn’t really bother you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It’s not good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is no longer the thing about the keyboard that bothers me. The change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in layout, certain things are just things you get used to. But certain things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are actually just worse over time. And I think one of the things that really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco negatively affects me about this keyboard, that one of the problems I keep hitting, is just the lack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dead space around the keys to feel. As I’m figuring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out by using it, it turns out I did that a lot. Feel around the dead spaces around the keys to kind of orient myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco physically without looking and especially around the arrow keys. So to have now the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shrunk down little tiny margin between the keys now, the keys are now much bigger, flatter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and because of the reduced travel, the edges are actually less noticeable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by feel and everything else too. So it’s a harder keyboard to type on blindly for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. I have to… I make a lot more mistakes. Even now that I’m more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accustomed to the feel of it, I’m making a lot more mistakes that involved my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hands not being oriented correctly on the keys where I thought they were. So that part I still don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love. I still think this is a bad keyboard but it’s only because the bar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was pretty high because for a long time Apple has made laptop keyboards that I would never describe them as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great because you know they still had laptop scissor key switches which are always a compromise right but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall Apple’s laptop keyboards I have never I haven’t given them any thought whatsoever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever until the MacBook one came out and now now that that keyboards on there close enough to that keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is on all the new ones all previous Apple laptops I’ve had before this and I’ve had one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every generation since the powerbook g3 aluminum sorry g4 aluminum sorry Stephen again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even having a problem that I bet with me but anyway yeah since the g4 aluminum powerbook every keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since then I’ve had no problems with and I’ve enjoyed using and it’s been great and fine and this is the this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the very first time where they’ve made like a to me a very controversial keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so anyway all that is to say overall I like it the new giant trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really do love I love that since the beginning I have not had the issues that people have had with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like accidental input with your wrist resting on it otherwise yeah overall good computer the SSD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed increase is very very nice the GPU speed increase might be affecting me I don’t even know probably not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but anyway overall good computer I wish the battery lasted longer in heavy use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it turns out it actually is no worse than the last one in heavy use right did you say you’d love the trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I do well since I so I love the the largeness of it I do not love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco force touch I or force click whatever they’re God whatever they’re calling that feature
⏹️ ▶️ John you just mean clicking like clicking in general is what you’re talking about you’re not talking about force
⏹️ ▶️ John like where you press really hard like yeah not what you’re talking about you’re talking about clicking because your complaint has been like I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John the the trackpads that don’t actually move
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and you know you keep
⏹️ ▶️ John on two shows you’ve been raving about this is entirely because you’re in tap-to-click wizard school with Harry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes if I actually have to invoke a real like a real like normal click by pushing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know forcefully or by pushing someone hard on the trackpad I hate those clicks they’re terrible and the fact that everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinks they’re just as good or okay baffles me. I have no idea why anybody could think that’s a good click. But I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switched to tap-to-click mode and it’s fine. Any other follow-up? I guess not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can keep derailing us if you want. We are sponsored this week by Squarespace.
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Consumer Reports drama
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently, Consumer Reports went into a Safari debug area
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and said, hey, guess what? We are going to turn off the cache, which,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, I guess that kind of makes sense because you want to make sure that it’s not just cruising along
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just regurgitating the same stuff it has over and over and over again. Okay, fine. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, it’s still not a completely fair test. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they spoke with Apple and Apple was like, well, you guys probably shouldn’t have done this. Most users won’t have done that. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some developers do. I can’t say that I usually do. But also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on top of that, there was some sort of issue that I’ve heard was related to favicons, favicons,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever they’re called, but I don’t know if that was ever confirmed or not. And so there was a legitimate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bug here in addition to them just meddling about.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t think they’re really meddling because the whole point of battery tests is to simulate real user activity.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we should put a link in the show notes for Jason Snell’s article. He went over all this stuff. And having done some battery
⏹️ ▶️ John testing myself, I can relate to this. You can’t actually have human beings
⏹️ ▶️ John do your testing because they’re too variable. But to try to simulate human activity
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually very difficult because humans are inscrutable, but you need it to be exactly the same
⏹️ ▶️ John every single time. And you also want it to be comparable from year to year and model
⏹️ ▶️ John to model. And what they’re doing with the cache is, I mean, it could be argued
⏹️ ▶️ John that they should get thousands upon thousands of unique websites that they need to load, but then you have to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John the variability of those websites being up and them changing and so on and so forth. So instead they have probably a small set
⏹️ ▶️ John of URLs that they cycle through, and they want it to load from the network each time. They don’t want it to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a test of how well it can read from the cache, right? So they want to exercise the Wi-Fi and all the other things.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the end, it’s all a vague approximation of what an actual person might do with the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s probably not particularly scientific in terms of like, we’ve had 100 users use their computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and put metrics on every single input and output and said how many bytes over Wi-Fi on what intervals with what
⏹️ ▶️ John burst and what see, like they don’t do that. And then try to find an artificial workload that exactly matches it. Maybe Apple does that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Consumer Reports doesn’t. Like it’s all kind of guesswork. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think like Marco said in his thing, the numbers they give you for like X amount of hours, that only applies
⏹️ ▶️ John to their test. And even if it was done by a human, you’re not that human. You might do different things with your computer. All you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for is, is it better or worse than the last laptop? Is it, you know, you’re looking for
⏹️ ▶️ John big swings of like, we have a light web browsing test and like an intensive test
⏹️ ▶️ John and what is the difference between them? And is the light test like two hours less time
⏹️ ▶️ John than last year or more time or, you know, it’s all voodoo. So them disabling
⏹️ ▶️ John the cache to say, we really want to test fetching this information over the network every single
⏹️ ▶️ John time, so don’t even bother looking at your disk cache, I think that’s a perfectly valid thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. And furthermore, that wouldn’t explain their widely variable results. They’re waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John like from 19 hours to like three hours or something. Disabling the cache has nothing to do with that, except,
⏹️ ▶️ John as the story goes, that disabling the cache also triggered some other weird Safari bug
⏹️ ▶️ John that I haven’t seen a technical explanation for. But anyway, Apple identified
⏹️ ▶️ John this bug. They’re going to fix the bug. Consumer Reports says, I think they have a beta build that fixes the bug. And lo and behold,
⏹️ ▶️ John they get sane testing results. Marco was cranky about this. He wrote a blog post saying how
⏹️ ▶️ John the real story is that this was an Apple bug. But Apple’s press release about it tries to deflect blame and say it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Consumer Reports doing a weird thing. And Consumer Reports was only doing a weird thing insofar as
⏹️ ▶️ John all artificial battery testing is a weird thing. I think everything Consumer Reports was doing was reasonable. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you wanted to yell at Consumer Reports about something, it would be like, it’s pretty clear Consumer Reports
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’ve identified a bug. Like you are not privy to some secret information that no other person
⏹️ ▶️ John who owns this laptop has figured out. Like everyone else is getting anywhere from 19 to 3 hours, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not saying anything. But you Consumer Reports have revealed this amazing secret. So go ahead and publish
⏹️ ▶️ John a story and say, we can’t recommend these laptops because we’re getting crazy results out of the out of
⏹️ ▶️ John our battery tests. to sign consumer reports that it’s not time for you to publish yet. It’s time for you to figure out what the hell’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if the entire world was getting three hours to 19 hours, you would have heard about it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I would do consumer reports about. But instead, Apple was like, Oh, they’re using a special developer setting that most people don’t use. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John reflective of real world use. Well, no crap. It’s not reflective of real world use. They have to make an artificial benchmark.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s probably the same thing they’ve been doing to Mac laptops for years. Anyway, I’m getting worked up about it
⏹️ ▶️ John that Marco didn’t like their tone. I generally didn’t like the the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that Consumer Reports is doing something wrong with their testing. But I also didn’t like the idea that Consumer Reports decided to go ahead
⏹️ ▶️ John and publish before they’d actually figured out what the hell was going on, even though they were pretty close to figuring out like if they’d waited an
⏹️ ▶️ John extra week. Anyway, there’s enough blame to go around here. But the bottom line is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops battery life is pretty much what everyone has been saying about it, which is not fantastically
⏹️ ▶️ John better than the previous ones worse in some situations, potentially better than others if you learn how to do all the magic things that Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doing to it. But certainly not, oh, you’re going to get three hours now, or possibly 19. It’s not that variable.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was a bug. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but again, I have seen though, in light usage so far, from what I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually is a step back for a lot of, depending on what your usage is, what it includes, what apps you’re using,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what their needs are. I think Consumer Reports was right to point out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery life on this laptop is weird because it is like and that’s what you see that from users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from actual owners of it you’re seeing like yeah the battery life on this laptop is weird because what we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing is everything is so incredibly aggressively power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco managed to the last drop if any factor takes more power than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should or than you think it is or if you have like anything running away in the background or turning on the discrete GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or or burning a CPU core for a while, if anything is not perfect,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your battery life can be dramatically reduced. Like by, on the order of hours less than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you thought or what you usually get. That is a real problem. And you know, in Consumer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Reports’ case, it was because of seemingly the Safari bug, which you know, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out like, you know, if it’s a bug that only shows up when the cache is disabled, and it seems apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by some other statement to be related to Safari’s caching of icons, And that makes a lot of sense. It’s almost certainly like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Touch icon or Favicon infinite loop of fetching those things because it thinks it doesn’t have them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they aren’t in the cache because the cache is disabled. So it’s probably that. Any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web programmer can figure out, okay, that’s probably what the bug, or the bug is probably in that area. But it doesn’t really matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John If that’s what it was, why, I don’t think what Consumer Reports was revealing is what you’re talking about, the variability
⏹️ ▶️ John between idle and regular power. Because as far as I understand from reading the Consumer Reports thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John they were running the same battery test and from one execution of that
⏹️ ▶️ John same test to the next getting one time they get three and a half hours one time they get 19.
⏹️ ▶️ John The same test. Not people like users like one day you use an Xcode the other day you’re browsing the web of course your results
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to vary and potentially they could vary as much as you said like if you spend the entire time you know playing
⏹️ ▶️ John a game or doing renders in a you know multi-core like ray tracing program like you You could
⏹️ ▶️ John get three hours and you could get 19 if you’re just text editing with everything turned off, right? But Consumer Reports is like, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John running the same battery test and we’re getting these wildly variable results. And that I think is not illuminating
⏹️ ▶️ John in the way that you were describing, like to inform consumers that the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that depending on your activity, the battery life can be variable. It’s almost like they were saying the thing is broken and unpredictable,
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you buy this laptop, you never know what you’re going to get, which is not the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s true. No, that’s actually like, that’s a real thing. And in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would this be the first time an Apple bug caused a process to go a little bit crazy? No.
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s related to a bug. I mean, that’s true of any laptop. You could have any laptop that has some process grinding through an infinite
⏹️ ▶️ John loop in the background and your fans spin up and it’ll slaughter your battery life. I mean, maybe they made the fans too quiet so you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John any external indication. Remember when you used to listen to your computers to tell how they were doing, you’d hear
⏹️ ▶️ John the floppy drive going to know how it’s going or later you’d hear the hard drive going to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out is the thing in a loop, is it frozen? It sounds like I need more RAM. Is it swapping, is
⏹️ ▶️ John something going wrong? Or looking at drive lights blinking and stuff like that. We’ve slowly lost most of these physical
⏹️ ▶️ John manifestations of the computer. All we have left is on laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John in particular on the Apple line, the terrible fan noise, and now even that is tamped down.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Or, well, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you feel it like when your phone gets hot. You’re like, why is my phone so hot? I don’t think I’m doing anything. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops get hot, for that
⏹️ ▶️ John You know? But anyway, like. It is true the performance is variable, but their battery
⏹️ ▶️ John test giving these results and saying we just can’t recommend this because we just we can’t get a beat on the battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was not a useful or accurate statement. What they should have said is we think we’ve revealed a bug and then you could
⏹️ ▶️ John have spun it out into a larger story about variability between idle and whatever power and demonstrated
⏹️ ▶️ John that by saying here we played some game for this amount of time. Look what it did to the battery life. And here we just tool around text
⏹️ ▶️ John editor. Like, I don’t know. I’m not a fan. For example, I’m not a fan of Consumer Reports
⏹️ ▶️ John reviews of cars, because I think they don’t understand what makes a good car. And in general, I haven’t been a fan
⏹️ ▶️ John of Consumer Reports reviews of computers, because they, especially when it comes to Apple, they’re prone to
⏹️ ▶️ John go to press with something that sounds sensational, rather than working on it until they figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out what the hell’s going on. Because figuring out what the hell’s going on, you still have a story there that you can explain. But
⏹️ ▶️ John going to press and saying, we can’t recommend these laptops. That is, you know, coming from us to show that it’s complained
⏹️ ▶️ John about these laptops a lot, that is too far. It’s not as if this is a broken product that no one should buy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, maybe it doesn’t suit your needs or whatever, for them to say, we just can’t recommend this laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not a responsible thing to publish, given the facts that we know so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and to be fair, though, they actually did contact Apple beforehand, and Apple gave them some kind of, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, canned response. But it sounded like basically, it’s just like, you know, basically a non response from PR.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they did first contact Apple to you know, to ask about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but that’s still still on them to figure out what’s going to make a to make the right recommendation.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s their job as the publication and like to backslide three days later when Apple works with them some more
⏹️ ▶️ John and find out it’s a bug. It’s like, well, I don’t know, I asked people putting in a chat room like, can you imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John a non tech going through the same thing and publishing that said that they’d figure out what was going on. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re a more trusted source for how good computers are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably yes, but I have a hard time looking at this. I mean, look, Consumer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Reports, we all know that they’re not perfect and that they are prone to like clickbaity headline sensationalism.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, what they saw was a real problem and it was not their problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they asked Apple about it and Apple gave them a non-response. So what were they supposed to do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These days Sometimes it takes a little bit of pushing for Apple from the outside to get things fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s on them though to realize that like if they haven’t heard this from anyone else Maybe it has something
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with the fact that they are They’re testing it under conditions that you have to test it under they’re testing
⏹️ ▶️ John an artificial testing issue Which I said aren’t bad but they have to realize that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John what we’re encountering because we haven’t heard anyone else have this problem is Because of something that we
⏹️ ▶️ John that we have to do as part of our uniform testing procedure, right? For example, the way you can figure this out is take your laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re supposedly testing and give it to one of your staffers And have them take it home with them at night and use
⏹️ ▶️ John it as their regular work laptop and say when you use it like A normal person does it seem okay to you? That’s a non-scientific
⏹️ ▶️ John test But it can definitely tell you whether like I use it yesterday and I got this battery life
⏹️ ▶️ John And I use the next day did pretty much the same stuff and got like 1 8th of that And if they say no or
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s much more consistent when I use it like that Well, like they can narrow down this maybe it’s because we’re disabling the cache now
⏹️ ▶️ John granted That’s that’s a little bit of debugging there to understand that, you know, what are you doing to cause this problem and
⏹️ ▶️ John removing variables and stuff like that. But if you’re going to come out as a publication and say, we just can’t recommend
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, like the thing is, I can’t recommend this laptop. Like you should not buy this product
⏹️ ▶️ John that is going too far for something that, you know, consumer reports would agree if they tested. It
⏹️ ▶️ John does not manifest a normal usage in the way they saw that if you do pretty much the same thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John it, that you get you get that much variability in battery life. Because again, if that was true,
⏹️ ▶️ John every single publication that reviewed these laptops would say I do pretty much the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes I get, you know, six X the battery life that I do other times. And I can’t figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I partly agree with you. I agree with some of the things you’re saying. But basically, I think the disagreement I think we’re having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like whether Consumer Reports was reasonable to say what they said, or whether they should have done more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more work and testing or investigation or whatever. And I think, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they were perfect about it, but I think given what they were seeing, I think they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly reasonable to say what they said at that time. And now that they have new information, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said they are going to retest it. And that’s great because, you know, it would be one thing like if, you know, if Apple eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went to them and figured this out and Consumer Reports said, well, no, our test is done. Sorry, too late. You know, try again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 18 months when you release a new one. You know, that would be kind of a bad move on their part. But in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the situation they were in, with the very little information they had, and with a non-response from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they asked them about it, I don’t think it was that unreasonable to publish what they did when they did. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would make a few edits, but for the most part, I think it was in the ballpark. Now that they have new information, now they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are retesting. I think that is very reasonable. And I think the problem I had about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was basically Apple’s PR framing of their official statement. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ooh, Apple’s tone is really bitter almost recently. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the statement about the Dash developer, Bogdan Popescu, sorry if I mispronounced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Their statement about that situation was also really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit defensive and weird. And as more fact came out from both sides,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it became a little bit clear, like, oh, that statement was a little bit too aggressive and bitter and a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unnecessarily so. There’s something up, like when Apple gives a defensive statement like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it can use a little more editing than what it’s getting before it comes out. Because it’s like if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to write a nasty email and you wait until the next morning to send it, I think Apple needs to do that a little bit with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its defensive PR statements here because they come out with this very overly defensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attitude that’s honestly slightly B.S.y in certain ways. They kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BS around certain facts of the matter or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does not reflect well on them. They’re usually a trustworthy, straightforward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company with clear communication. And so to have these little defensive PR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco statements where that’s not the case is just off-putting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a little bit concerning for a company that we respect so much.
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree. The PR statement was bad, but I still think it’s in reports. they should have published was we not we
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t tell what’s going on because that was the truth they did not know what was going on and they what they should have said
⏹️ ▶️ John is when normal people use this we don’t see this kind of variability but in our battery
⏹️ ▶️ John test we get this variability we can’t explain that if they want to say therefore we can’t recommend this
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a matter of semantics like I guess they can’t recommend it technically because if they don’t get good results
⏹️ ▶️ John on their artificial test then that’s their criteria recommendation that they can’t recommend it but the way it was written
⏹️ ▶️ John up it was almost as if they were recommending against it and that it seemed conclusive. There wasn’t much of saying like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, we were stumped, we can’t figure this out, something here is going on that we obviously don’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the piece of information that was missing is that, you know, we are not privy to special information
⏹️ ▶️ John that the rest of the world doesn’t have. The rest of the world is using these laptops. Other publications are testing them, other people
⏹️ ▶️ John own them, this is a thing that only we are seeing, and that was, you know, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John were to read this and that was your source, authoritative source, you would say, well, these these
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops are obviously haunted, which is not the case. It was just like that the consumer reports was doing a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that induced a bug and the bug is a problem. And you’re right, there can be other kinds of bugs. But I don’t know, I just it just
⏹️ ▶️ John rubs me the wrong way. And you’re right, there is some history there with consumer reports doing similar types of things. And in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like consumer reports for I guess, at this point, with the advent of the wire cut and everything, I don’t like consumer reports
⏹️ ▶️ John for almost anything anymore. So maybe maybe a little bit of my general attitude about them is
⏹️ ▶️ John showing through. But like I said, I didn’t like the PR statement for all the reasons you noted, like them
⏹️ ▶️ John framing it as a consumer resource was doing a terrible thing. That is the wrong framing when the reality
⏹️ ▶️ John was there was an Apple bug. It should lead with that. It’s like there was a bug. We fixed it. Consumer Reports is retesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s such an easy PR win. Yeah, like if we read that statement, we go, we’d be like, all right, well, that explains it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thanks, Apple. We all understand the bugs exist. But instead, they led with Consumer Reports doing a weird thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not that weird. Anyway, now I’m mad at everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Like, that’s like, they couldn’t just say, you know, we discovered that the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were having was due to a bug where we fixed it and they’re going to read it like that would be the direct honest way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instead, they had to drill in that Consumer Reports test was somehow invalid or irrelevant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A hidden feature. It’s a checkbox in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which they’re like implying intent and possible malice that Consumer Reports was, with using this hidden
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re mad at Consumer Reports too. Yeah, and it’s like Apple couldn’t give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a statement without showing how mad they were about it. And again, that’s becoming more common with their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco defensive statements here. And I don’t think that’s a professional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to conduct yourselves in the context of PR. That’s what PR is not supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do. I don’t see… It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, that’s all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the flip side of the coin, though, you could make the argument to kind of take John’s point to the next level.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was irresponsible and PR-y in a bad way for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consumer reports to say, oh, we can’t recommend it, the battery’s crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The direct report, like John said, should have been, well, we’re not really sure what’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nobody else in the world seems to be getting similar results, so either don’t publish anything. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alternatively, you know, right now we’re saying no, but we got to get back to it. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like it was, from what I gather, it was a little bit more aggressive than that. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think there was malice there, but the same way, Marco, that you’re reading all this like malice and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey propaganda in the Apple response, which I think there’s truth to that, or at least it appears
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be true from my point of view, you can take that exact same approach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to looking at the Consumer Reports statement, which was in many ways also irresponsible and also premature and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also PR-y and also just not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Consumer Report, maybe it’s because my standards are so low for Consumer Reports, because like John I have lost a lot of faith
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in them over the years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So maybe I’m grading them on a curve here, but even if Consumer Reports did something outrageous,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that makes Apple’s tone of their response okay. Like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be the bigger person here. Exactly the same argument was made by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few people, I think including Matt and Reese, with Bodom Popescu about Dash.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like Apple’s, you know, Apple is Apple and, you know, they’re making these statements against
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one indie developer and this magazine slash website that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has cut its staff to the bone in recent years and is like barely afloat. And they’re Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? They are like Goliath here, right? Like they don’t…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m I’m sorry to mess up the metaphor, I know that’s kind of how that story goes, but Apple does not…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple can afford to be the bigger person here with their statements and to not kind of play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bully almost. And what the tone they take in these statements is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re not going to just tell you what happened, we are going to discredit the people who are making these accusations against us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first. We’re gonna make them… we’re gonna drag them through mud, we’re gonna make them look like they were bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and malicious and at fault and and doing crazy and invalid things when actually it was our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s move on.
Chris Lattner leaving Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the Swift Evolution email list, which the who knew that email lists were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still a thing. This is like straight out of 98. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco they are for language nerds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are. There’s a post from Chris Lattner that the title is update on the Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey project lead. And there’s a little bit preamble and then the meat of it is But
⏹️ ▶️ John before you start reading the subject line of that email, having
⏹️ ▶️ John worked in corporate America for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know what this means.
⏹️ ▶️ John Based solely on the subject line, you can tell what kind of news is going to be in
⏹️ ▶️ John the email. But having seen enough emails that euphemistically express
⏹️ ▶️ John personnel changes or other bad news about the company, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The best one is when the subject line is somebody’s name. Like the subject line is from someone else in the company and the name is like, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the employee’s name. Like, all right, either they died or they got fired. Like that’s one of those two things that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on update on is another great euphemism as we have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, the language used when somebody dies versus getting fired is pretty close.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s not go there. Okay. Not to say you’re wrong, but let’s not go there. So update on the Swift project lead from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chris Latner, and we’ll explain who he is in a second. But the meat of this email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I’m happy to announce that Ted Kremenick is that how you pronounce it? Do you guys know?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s go with it. Okay. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco happy to ATP,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the kings of pronunciation. Seriously, that Ted Kremenich will be taking over for me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as quote project lead quote for the Swift project managing the administrative and leadership responsibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Swift org This recognizes the incredible effort that he has already been putting into the project and reflects
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the decision I’ve made to leave Apple later this month to pursue an opportunity in another space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John way to bury the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this decision wasn’t made lightly and I want you all to know that I’m still completely committed to Swift I plan to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remain an active member of the Swift core team as well as a contributor to the Swift Evolution mailing list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then there’s some very nice, you know, comments about working at Apple, blah, blah, blah. Everything will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be okay. This guy isn’t falling, blah, blah, blah. That was about noon-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our time yesterday. Followed a few hours later with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a blog post on Tesla.com. Welcome Chris Latner. We would like to welcome Chris Latner who will join
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tesla as our vice president of Autopilot software. here. Chris’s reputation for engineering excellence is well known.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He comes to Tesla after 11 years at Apple, where he was primarily responsible for creating Swift, the programming language for building
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps on Apple platforms, and one of the fastest growing languages for doing so on Linux.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Prior to Apple, Chris was the lead author of the LLVM compiler infrastructure, an open source umbrella project that is widely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used in commercial products and academic research today. Whoa. So let’s back up a smidge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you want to tell us who Chris Latner is?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think both of those statements had his various titles in there. I had to actually look this up, I think his
⏹️ ▶️ John title upon departure from Apple was Senior Director and Architect
⏹️ ▶️ John Developer Tools Department. That’s a comma inside the title. It’s such a long title.
⏹️ ▶️ John But he was basically in charge of all dev tools. And when he came on board at Apple, he was lower down, but also doing compiler
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. He is responsible for getting Apple off GCC and
⏹️ ▶️ John on to a what was first a GCC work alike compiler based on the LLVM
⏹️ ▶️ John compiler building toolkit that he made that he started before he came to Apple. It’s probably one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple hired him, I’m sure. And then eventually Clang, which is the replacement for GCC.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, the Swift programming language that we all know and love and or are avoiding.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, uh, and, and, you know, so that, that’s who Chris
⏹️ ▶️ John Lattner is. He’s the, for in, uh, in sort of nerds who follow Apple parlance, but don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John him personally. He’s the guy who was on stage announcing Swift at WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s, that’s the dude. Um, so very important person. Apple has had a very illustrious career,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously the driving force between behind many of the biggest changes having to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John developer tools at Apple with, with the platform on which you develop because at this point his his final title like
⏹️ ▶️ John I think he was in charge of all Xcode not just like the compiler nitty-bitty he started off just doing compiler stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and moved all the way up till he’s you know ahead of all dev tools so wide-ranging influence
⏹️ ▶️ John and unquestionably Swift is the biggest thing to happen to develop on Apple platforms in many many
⏹️ ▶️ John many years and so he’s leaving and he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to Tesla and the first thing that occurred to me about this announcement was that
⏹️ ▶️ John it took place the first place I saw it anyway and I’m pretty sure the first place that it appeared
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere publicly was on the Swift evolution mailing list which is a public mailing
⏹️ ▶️ John list about the open source development of the Swift programming language because Swift is open
⏹️ ▶️ John source thanks to Chris’s efforts inside Apple and that’s where he chose to announce
⏹️ ▶️ John his departure not on Twitter not an Apple press release not in any other channel, not on his blog,
⏹️ ▶️ John but on the open source mailing list. And then he buried it, you know, two paragraphs down an email about
⏹️ ▶️ John a change in leadership of the open source effort, which I think in itself is a statement about
⏹️ ▶️ John his dedication to open source and his respect for the community that the few nerds
⏹️ ▶️ John who are following a mailing list of all things, can you believe who people, old people like me who
⏹️ ▶️ John still subscribe to mailing lists, it still happens and that he that he’s telling not the public
⏹️ ▶️ John at large and not a bunch of press outlets but the people who contribute to
⏹️ ▶️ John the evolution of the swift language. So I thought that made a statement
⏹️ ▶️ John and at the time the announce he was leaving I didn’t know where he was going but as Casey points out we didn’t have to wait
⏹️ ▶️ John very long. Only an hour or two later and the mystery was solved.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this is a big deal as far as I’m concerned. It’s hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say from an outsider’s point of view how much Chris
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was involved in. Well, I shouldn’t even say that since it is open source, but I personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t keep up with the day-to-day doings on the Swift project.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And certainly since Apple was kind enough, and I mean that genuinely, I’m not trying to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey snarky. Apple was kind enough to upload the entire commit history for Swift to GitHub,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and people went digging through the early commits for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift. And it really was Lattner’s baby for like a year or something like that. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gradually and gradually and gradually more and more Apple engineers came on board. But I mean, this is the language
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in which I write code every weekday. And this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in many ways, how I pay for the roof over my head this very moment. So, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I personally owe a great debt of gratitude to Chris Lattner. And I think Marco does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well, by virtue of Xcode being under Chris Lattner as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and LLVM and a lot of other stuff too, like not just Swift. You know, there were a lot of other things that he’d like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t use Swift yet, as everyone knows, haha. But Like, he also did tons of stuff for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire rest of the developer stack, including the compiler and Objective-C. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this certainly strikes me as a pretty darn big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal. It’s a pretty big blow to see somebody that important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that high up, and from everything I’ve ever heard that well-liked,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leave Apple. And then it’s just turning the darn knife for them to be going to Tesla. That’s not a bad thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey necessarily, but I’ve got to imagine that Apple’s pretty sensitive to these sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey defections and this one’s got a sting. And he’s not the only one, as people are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pointing out right now. There have been several relatively high profile, although I don’t think as high profile,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple departures on their way to Tesla. So this is kind of a bummer for Apple for
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we have a link in the show notes for Christina Warren’s article where she gathered this big list of recent
⏹️ ▶️ John departures and the companies that they’re going to and you see a lot of Tesla in that list. I mean, obviously this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a scientific sample. Apple, we have no idea what Apple’s normal turnover is and if this is more than usual
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but high profile ones like this, like those are the ones that we notice and it’s a good occasion
⏹️ ▶️ John to see like if people are leaving Apple, where are they going? And it looks like right now, uh, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, perhaps more people than perhaps people thought were leaving Apple to go to Tesla, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess would seem weird if there hasn’t been rumors of an Apple car-related project for so many years, but now just is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes sense. Right. I mean, like, and it depends on the person too. Like, you know, somebody like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Latner, I mean, this is, you know, he’s obviously an incredibly smart engineer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, and yeah, and that’s like understating things. Right. Also is apparently a really good woodworker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, um, you know, really smart engineers tend to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend to do two things. Either they get a job at one company and work there forever for their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire career. A place like Google or something. They go there and they stay forever. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is often what more academic programmers tend to like to do, because that tends to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enable them to be a little bit more academically free, in a way, and to really get established,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to really not have to worry about the employment situation much, and just do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great intellectual things. And then the other pattern you usually see for really talented, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart people, in engineering at least they’ll do one thing for a couple of years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then they want to do something else because they just want to keep like attacking new crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting problems and once they have have kind of gotten something stable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or released or whatever they get antsy I want to move to something else usually you see those two extremes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with very smart engineers because you know we know Chris’s is that level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of talent it could have just been the latter like Like it’s hard to look at this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to really read anything into this one person changing jobs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s not to say the aggregate doesn’t maybe say something, but this one person changing jobs to a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different company, somebody who’s that smart, it is not unheard of for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to change. And he’s been at Apple for a long time. And so to change… Was it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 11 years? I forgot. 11… Something like that. I believe that’s right. long and that’s a lot for somebody of that caliber that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long time so the fact that he just left and even though he what he left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us somewhere that’s that’s possibly like a bit of a red flag that alone I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think is reason for concern now if you look there’s a couple of things about this that are interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and possibly concerning if you’re looking at Apple one I think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the timing is a little odd. You know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is at this point, it’s barely even secret anymore that Apple is working on a car project and that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devoting a lot of resources to it. You can look around what they’re doing in the rest of the product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines and it seems like they’re having a hard time keeping up with pretty much everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re devoting a lot of resources to something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, less than before, though, if the rumors are to be believed, because before they were were devoting way more resources
⏹️ ▶️ John when they were supposedly making an actual physical car and then supposedly rumor says that they laid off a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of people and said no we’re not actually making a physical car instead we’re making self-driving software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well it sounds more like the answer was we’re not making a car yet. I think that was the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re not or at least we’re not making this car that we have been working on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway well all we’ve got is rumors because Apple didn’t say anything about this but but the non-rumor thing is what
⏹️ ▶️ John what is Chris Lattner going to do at Tesla? Vice President of autopilot software. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if Chris was actually interested in working on software for self-driving cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously we know for a fact Tesla has a department working on that. And supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple possibly maybe if you believe the rumors also had a department doing that. So it’s not even as if he
⏹️ ▶️ John had to leave Apple to work on car things maybe. But that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why we’re saying it’s like twisting the knife to go to Tesla because it’s I mean it’s it’s It’s kind of strange
⏹️ ▶️ John to compare rumors of what Apple is supposedly doing with the concrete reality of what we know
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla is doing. But in tech news circles and the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla and Apple have this open door policy, apparently, with their personnel going in both
⏹️ ▶️ John directions and a slight animosity about poaching each other’s employees, the competition between
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and Tesla seems to be a real thing. Whether it’s founded on an actual overlap in product
⏹️ ▶️ John efforts is still unknown.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s the thing is that irrespective of whether or not Apple is working on a car or car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey related things It seems pretty clear even from all the way on the other coast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there is increasing amounts of animosity between the two companies about defections
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from one to the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and and that’s why like, you know, like the company he went to is interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know for that reason reason, what he went there to do when Apple allegedly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumored-wise, has that department in active development is interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the timing, I think, is interesting because I don’t… Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does Swift seem like it’s in a very stable place right now? Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t follow it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so I can’t answer that question because no matter what I say, half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Swift users will say, I am dead wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the simple answer is, it is not yet totally stable, but we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are told that Swift 4 will bring ABI stability, and at that point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the bumps in the road should really start to smooth out. I’m not saying that’s accurate, but I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what everyone is being told. So take that for what you can interpret that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be whatever you mean. But that should be soon. Also, next year’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the year of Linux on the desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, stability, another word for stability, you know, you’re only stable when you’re dead. Like it’s never actually
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco be stable. It’s always going to be growing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The question is like, so Swift is Chris Lautner’s baby,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And timing-wise, if you were to look at it in terms of the Swift language, it’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit weird to to move on to other things before you’re sure that
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, you know, your child has grown grown into an adult or the
⏹️ ▶️ John very least is potty trained. Right. And I’m not gonna say a B I compel to release
⏹️ ▶️ John potty training, but like having to bundle like, you know, the all the libraries with your
⏹️ ▶️ John application because you can’t be guaranteed binary compatibility with the next version of the standard
⏹️ ▶️ John library and stuff that to me still feels like a language that is not yet not yet fully
⏹️ ▶️ John formed. It’s not like it’s you know, it’s not like an unstable or too much is changing because they’re they’re you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, source compatibility is there they’re on the source compatibility train at that point. And even so even when they weren’t on the
⏹️ ▶️ John source compatibility train, I don’t think it was that bad. And Xcode was good about helping you update your stuff like it wasn’t, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s on version three. It’s not version, you know, point 09 or whatever, like they, they incremented in
⏹️ ▶️ John major versions pretty quickly, because they did change major changes to the language during that time.
⏹️ ▶️ John One last thing, like Casey said, is ABI compatibility. I feel like after that, it’s not as if it’s stable. It’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John going to improve and get better, but I think it will have crossed the line into a language
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can use without any more caveats, any more implementation caveats. Because now your caveats
⏹️ ▶️ John may be like, oh, well, I don’t like this feature or that feature. But once it works like Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ John and that it’s like a language that you can write in to be, you know, and your application will be compatible with the next version
⏹️ ▶️ John of the US and all the frameworks and libraries and all that other stuff, without you having to bundle all that crap with your app
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s a sign of language that isn’t quite done. So to have Chris leave before
⏹️ ▶️ John the you know the baby leaves the nest I keep searching for new analogies and which one we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco going to pick as a favorite but
⏹️ ▶️ John like because it’s so bad to say like oh he left before Swift is done. Swift is never going to be done. The language is never done but like
⏹️ ▶️ John before I feel like it crosses the line. Now he didn’t leave right after 1.0 because that would be a much worse
⏹️ ▶️ John time to leave and Swift is certainly in good hands. It’s not like it was hinging on him being there, but
⏹️ ▶️ John purely from the perspective of wouldn’t you like to be there to see this thing through,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if as he expresses in his letters, not, you know, the language is fine. It’s in good hands. There
⏹️ ▶️ John is a roadmap. There are people executing on it. He is not super essential to that. And even if he was, he can still
⏹️ ▶️ John contribute to it and open source like that’s fine. It’s not as if he’s it’s not as if him leaving is
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem for Swift the language at all, but emotionally speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you know, it seems, you know, if I put myself in his place, I would want
⏹️ ▶️ John to, like, say you were going to retire or whatever, you would choose not to retire until, let me just get this Swift thing and just,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, see it off into the sunset and say, here’s my great accomplishment. And he can do that now,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t know, I think I would want to
⏹️ ▶️ John see it along a little bit farther before I considered it like a mission accomplished
⏹️ ▶️ John and now it can now it can continue to grow and blossom into a successful adult or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John and so that’s I guess I mean to the the next larger point here about big
⏹️ ▶️ John departures like this reasons people might leave Apple Marco touched on a lot of these already like you know really
⏹️ ▶️ John smart people you get bored or you know if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re you just want to try something else you decide you know it’ll be a programming or you know you don’t feel like you can advance
⏹️ ▶️ John in the organization anymore. But I feel like at this at this very high level when you start
⏹️ ▶️ John getting to like people with senior and director in their title I have to think that the only reason
⏹️ ▶️ John people leave aside from on the Marco said of like I just want to do something else which is definitely a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is that there’s some fundamental disagreement about something important
⏹️ ▶️ John if that important thing is your own advancement in the organization Um, that could be it
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who like who feel like their careers always have to be advancing and if they feel like they’ll never be able to advance farther.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, I don’t, you know, even though Chris climbed up the ladder very quickly, I don’t feel like he was going to be CEO.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t think that’s his barrier. Um, it’s, you know, I have no information here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nobody does. No one is going to talk about this, but I have to think it’s just a, you know, a disagreement about something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and doesn’t need to be a disagreement that involves any animosity. and doesn’t need to be a disagreement
⏹️ ▶️ John in which either apple or the person leaving is right or wrong and the company is doomed or the person is
⏹️ ▶️ John doomed or anything like that but just sometimes uh there is just a fundamental intractable
⏹️ ▶️ John disagreement and you know you either live with it or you decide i don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to live with it because i can go do whatever i want and maybe i want to try something different because you know whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John so in in the absence of any other information which will obviously never be forthcoming
⏹️ ▶️ John because, you know, nice people don’t talk about these things until many, many years later,
⏹️ ▶️ John and perhaps not even then. It seems to me an amicable departure
⏹️ ▶️ John based on a fundamental disagreement about a thing that is
⏹️ ▶️ John probably not particularly consequential to Apple, but was obviously very consequential
⏹️ ▶️ John to Chris Lattner. And so I think that is a reasonable reason
⏹️ ▶️ John to move on to something else, just as reasonable as I’m bored and want to try something else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as an illustrative example, let’s suppose that Lattner really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really wanted to open source Swift. And, you know, this is three or four years ago or two years ago, whatever it was. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that hadn’t happened yet. An example of something that Apple may not be that big a deal, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Chris maybe a huge deal is he goes to his higher ups to Craig or whomever at Apple and says, I want to open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey source Swift. And Craig or whomever says, not going to happen. And Chris says, well, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m out. You know, obviously, that isn’t the case. But that’s the sort of thing, John, I think you’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just as a hypothetical example. Is that fair?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s a perfect example. Because that’s the type of thing that like, he might care deeply about,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that it might, you know, like this, his, his dream might not just be I’m going to make this
⏹️ ▶️ John new language called Swift, but also that he wants to be open source because he wants to see the language spread beyond
⏹️ ▶️ John the walls of Apple. Now, arguably, if they told him no open
⏹️ ▶️ John source after the language had been announced, like it’s a little bit late for that or whatever, but obviously they did announce the language and it was
⏹️ ▶️ John an open source and only was open source later. So he, you know, he was a driver
⏹️ ▶️ John for that inside Apple, which is no secret. He says it himself on his own website
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to read it. And, you know, anyone who’s heard him speak about it before it was open source could
⏹️ ▶️ John tell that he was in favor of it because he was asked in interviews or whatever about it. Swift open source, you’d be like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could tell that he wanted it. And eventually he got it. If he hadn’t gotten it, maybe that would have been
⏹️ ▶️ John something that said, you know, this is really, this is really crushed my dream about Swift. And I really wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ John be open source. And this is a deal breaker for me. And it’s the type of thing that that Apple would know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they would know that this important person who’s been important to the company wants this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if we decide no on it, it could cause him to leave. Like, that’s, you know, turnover is a possibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, like, it’s not as if I think this is a mystery or surprise to anyone involved in it. And, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how these things go down. If you have a super important person in the company, you will be willing to do things
⏹️ ▶️ John to retain that person that you wouldn’t otherwise. That’s another one of these bullet points. How do you retain? How
⏹️ ▶️ John do you retain the best people in your company? One of the ways you retain them is finding out what’s important to them,
⏹️ ▶️ John and wherever possible, without compromising the good of the whole company or the rest of the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John work there being willing to do to bend over backwards to keep them there. I’m sure, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John what kind of things they had to do to keep Johnny Ive there, but I’m sure there are a lot of them and you know
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will be entirely willing to do them. Oh, you want to work from England for a few years? Oh, you want to, you know, make this product? You want
⏹️ ▶️ John to do the Apple Watch edition? You want to make a three hundred dollar book? Like, whatever! Like, those are easy,
⏹️ ▶️ John easy, sure, we’re going to keep Johnny Ive, we’re going to make him happy. That’s how you retain employees, but at a certain point
⏹️ ▶️ John johnny i’ve says i want to stop making iphones and start making pens only
⏹️ ▶️ John with inking them and they’re gonna and if you don’t let me do this i’m leaving the company apples gonna say well johnnie
⏹️ ▶️ John were the market is something yeah well i don’t miss it well johnnie we’re gonna have to part ways here because we’re not gonna stop
⏹️ ▶️ John making iphones no matter how much you wanna make pens you know so idea i there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John bad guy in that situation is just a you know and and i’m a cool parting of ways among
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s wild. And I mean, a lot of people have been saying for a long time that retention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is one of the biggest threats to Apple. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not that Chris Lattner leaving alone proves that theory, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly it gives credence to that theory because this certainly seems like a big deal. Now, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people in the chat seem to think that this is, well, I’m filling in some blanks here, but seem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be perseverating on the thought that He’s now going to be a VP of Tesla. So this is in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey principle and imprint an upgrade in title. And that could be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough. I don’t think that’s the case. I mean, I don’t know Chris, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the impression of him that I got is that he’s not the kind to chase a title. He’s the kind that just wants to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting work, but it could be as simple as he wanted to be a VP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and. You know, Craig isn’t going anywhere and I don’t even know if he reported up to Craig, but it just seems logical. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he decided, you know what, I want to be a VP somewhere and Tesla’s doing interesting stuff. So off I go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tend to think that John is right, that it’s something deeper than that, but you never know. People do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey odd things for odd reasons and a variable could be that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, honestly, like if I were to take a job in Silicon Valley,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a massive if I know, and that’s very unlikely to ever happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I can’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John that. We should make a reality show of that if that ever happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. But if I were to ever take a job at Silicon Valley, I think Apple and Tesla would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my top two picks And I think it would it might be more interesting for me to work at Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know I would I would honestly very heavily consider both if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got offers from both and I think I might lean towards Tesla because I think that might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The kind of the more exciting place to be right now for my interests I don’t know. I could totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see why somebody would would make that decision. So anyway My summary of this is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there are lots of legitimate reasons why somebody would go from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Tesla that are not like bad signs for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple. However, there are enough like possible bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco signs for Apple here especially with things like the timing and what he’s going there to do with Apple possibly having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that same position in active development right now. There There are reasons here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people to be concerned. I don’t think this is a massive story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on its own, but it might be part of a bigger story. We don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Is Tesla poaching tons of people from Apple? We don’t really know because typically when people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to Apple from anywhere else, Apple tends to keep that pretty quiet. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re only seeing one side of this. I think when Tesla takes people, they’re not that quiet about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they don’t really care. When Apple hires people, they tend to want to keep that very quiet. So we’re only really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing one direction of this. It could be a more balanced exchange of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t know. However, if you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scraps that we’re getting, scraps of info and rumors and knowledge about Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s getting increasingly hard to look at this in a way that doesn’t look bad. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks like something is going wrong in a pretty serious way. And that could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be wrong, because again, we don’t have that much information here. But it’s getting harder and harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look at this and explain it in a way where, oh yeah, everything’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, what do you think a serious issue? Like give a hypothetical where this would be concerning. Like you mentioned the fact that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially has a self-driving software thing too, so why couldn’t he just stay at Apple and do the self-driving software thing? Is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John only situation you think looks bad or are there other ones?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re seeming it seeming like we are eating a lot of costs as Apple customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to fund the Apple car project. It seems like they’re putting a whole lot of talent on something big there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that almost everyone seems to agree is almost certainly a car project. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has been like decreasingly secretive about that, like in like Tim Cook statements and everything like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t seem like they’re trying to hide it. I think the cat’s out of
⏹️ ▶️ John the bag. We don’t know who they’re putting on it. They could be hiring all new people for the car team, for all we know. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true, but we’re hearing a lot of rumblings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a lot of different places over time that it’s actually becoming a significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talent suck to the organization. So basically, Apple’s putting a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of resources and sacrificing some attention on their existing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product lines into this car project and it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem like it’s going well internally through whatever reasons like whether it’s you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interpersonal issues management issues bad direction who knows we were probably never going to know that but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t appear that whatever is happening there it doesn’t look good it seems like we’re seeing a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cracks and symptoms on the outside that indicate like things are not going the way they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were expected to go and so So if Apple is pouring all of these resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into something, I sure hope that we’re getting something out of it. I sure hope that this is going to be worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to some end, because if not, this is a serious management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. That is my main concern, that it seems like we’re seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco increasing signs, you know, over the last couple years, we’re seeing increasing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco signs that Apple might be having serious management problems. almost any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these individual problems or symptoms or failures that we see that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trickles out almost any individual one could be explained away by like, oh, well, you know, that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intel’s fault. That was just, you know, happenstance or that just didn’t go well or whatever else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there sure are a lot of these things piling up and it’s getting increasingly harder to draw any other conclusion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than they’re having serious management problems. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know my my position on this is always that I don’t know enough about the internal workings of Apple to assign blame.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and, and the few things I do know, the, the most I know about the internal works of Apple are things from the
⏹️ ▶️ John past because like that’s when people talk like years and years after it already happened, then you find out what really went on
⏹️ ▶️ John and organizationally personality wise and management wise, it, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, Apple was seemed to be just as big a pit of Vipers around
⏹️ ▶️ John the time that Apple introduced the iPhone, you know, their, their greatest success, uh, as it was
⏹️ ▶️ John at any other time. So I, you know, I just I just don’t know what goes on inside Apple. I don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s any worse than it was before. All I have to judge them by are the products that they put out
⏹️ ▶️ John right. And in that respect, as we’ve talked about in past shows, we feel like they’re you know, they’re slacking off
⏹️ ▶️ John in some areas we think they shouldn’t be and so on and so forth. But I can’t I personally
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t make a leap from my satisfaction with the products they’re putting out to
⏹️ ▶️ John internal management related things. I just because I just feel like I I don’t have enough visibility there because like there’s such
⏹️ ▶️ John a black box. I have no idea what’s going on in there. Maybe it’s 10 times better than it was when
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone was introduced, right? Maybe it’s 10 times worse. I don’t know. I can’t I can’t match it up. Certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John Chris leaving doesn’t is not a really a point on that graph because as we discussed earlier, like
⏹️ ▶️ John there are so many reasons I feel like he could leave even if getting back to the scenario was like, why didn’t you just stay at Apple and do drive
⏹️ ▶️ John self driving car stuff? If I was Apple management, like I wouldn’t really want Chris Latimer
⏹️ ▶️ John working on self self driving car stuff, no matter how much he wants to that I feel like that would almost be a situation where it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John Chris, if you really want to work on self driving car stuff, like, we’ve already got a team doing that. And even
⏹️ ▶️ John though it seems cool to you, we have someone managing that team. And like that, you know, Chris’s
⏹️ ▶️ John value to Apple, your value to Apple is higher, leading the swift effort right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Chris may disagree with that and say, Well, I don’t care. I don’t want to do that. And they there may be parting ways there and
⏹️ ▶️ John say, you know, we want you to do this. You want you know I mean, like I just I just feel like I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John enough visibility into that type of stuff to know. Um, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco as we’ve discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past, I’m concerned, personally concerned about the some of the products they’re putting out and decisions they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John making about the products, but I can’t draw the line to the internals because it’s just it’s just a, you know, a big cloud to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, again, that’s why I think it’s important to not jump on the like something’s going wrong at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco train with any one of these things, because Again, any one of these, you’re right, any one of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various things that happen that one explanation could be a management issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t conclude that from just one point. But what I’m saying is that we’re seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last year or two an increasing number of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeming cracks in the foundation where that’s one of the explanations. And eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard to make other conclusions when you have a lot of things that all could be explained
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by, you know, oh well maybe this thing just went badly or maybe there’s some other explanation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But one of the explanations is like problems going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean that certainly could be, but I tend to come down on John’s side on this in that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it could be that it’s management issues, but we can’t know. I mean especially someone at Chris’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey level, and I mean that both in terms of org chart and just brute intelligence. After
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a while, it wouldn’t surprise me if you just got bored. Like comparatively, compared to Chris Ladner, I’m a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frigging idiot. And I get bored after a few years at most jobs I’ve ever had.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so he was at Apple 11 years. It’s in granted, he worked on different things while he was there and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he has a lot to be proud of, but it could be something as simple as boredom. I still come back to what John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said. I think this was some sort of disagreement with somebody, but. I don’t personally see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such a direct line from Latner and others leaving to management problems. And let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go back to what one of you said about the iPhone when, you know, everyone was getting sucked into the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey At the beginning of that multi-year process, that probably looked kind of not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if we were around, well, we were around, but if we were a podcast then, if we were all, all three of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple fans, then we would probably be saying, wow, the iPod really looks like crap compared to a year ago. I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s going on in there. And as it turns out, what was going on in there was the iPhone. Now is project
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Titan or whatever it’s called today. Is that going to be the next iPhone? Who knows? But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t necessarily mean that bad things are happening. If talent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is getting sucked into Titan, it doesn’t necessarily mean that bad things are happening. If talent is leaving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, all that being said, we are certainly getting enough data points
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to point to something not being good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It may or may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not be management. I think I’m beating you up a little bit about it being management, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with you, Marco, that something looks amiss here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t know what.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, and when I say management, I’m not saying this one particular person should be fired or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m saying in the sense of it’s a manager’s job to fix this and management-level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decisions might be problematic. So things like resource allocation, choosing what direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things should go in, personnel changes, those all rest on management.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if it appears that Apple’s having problems in those kinds of areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over a decent amount of time and with enough of these data points where that looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a likely explanation, that is up to management to fix. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s up to either the lower level people who these various problems might be under,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But ultimately, it’s up to Tim. Like, that is the CEO’s job, is to be the ultimate manager. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if things are going wrong with management inside the company, the ultimate responsibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fix it eventually rests at the CEO. And that, like, again, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think there might be other explanations for these things. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone’s doing a great job, but there sure are a lot of cracks showing in the foundation and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point, I think we, as Apple commentators, have to consider the possibility that maybe things aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t think anyone’s debating—well, I don’t think the two of us are debating with you that things may not be going well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s such a big black box that it’s so hard to pontificate—and arguably that’s what we’re supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do—but it’s hard to pontificate with any sort of accuracy and reliability what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going on in there. But it’s certainly interesting, and it is even more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting, like one of you guys said because everything we know is that there’s an equivalent project
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happening within Apple. But, I mean, to use a silly example, so a couple of jobs ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was doing a whole bunch of SharePoint development, which if you’ve ever touched SharePoint, you’ll know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a miracle I’m not bald right now from ripping my hair out. But anyway. Is there anything wrong with that? Not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. But I had been doing it for like four years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I had begged and begged and begged to do anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And eventually it was made clear to me that that wasn’t going to happen because I was too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey valuable as a SharePoint developer to move me off to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else. And so I left. Now, to Marco’s point, that is to some degree a management
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem. Yeah. That is absolutely a management problem. But what I’m driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at is it isn’t necessarily indicative of a problem throughout the entire It’s a problem with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how I was handled. And if, and either I was not valuable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to them to, to, to, to acquiesce and, and to do what I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them to do, or they just didn’t care, or they didn’t realize how serious I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was about how cranky I was, you know, there’s any number of reasons, but the moral of the story is I eventually left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I couldn’t do the thing I wanted to do. And, and I think John had said, Latner’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey valuable to Apple doing the crazy compiler nerdery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he does. Or at least that’s the way it seems, right? He’s also in charge of a hundred some people. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe all of us are reading this wrong. Maybe he’s just tired of being a manager and just wants to sling code again. Now as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey VP, it sounds to me like he’s probably going to be a manager again, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco get what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John it sounds like he’s still a manager. And he was still writing code at Apple. Like, you can go look at the commits. It’s not like he was,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, he didn’t give up writing code.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, no, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see what I’m driving at though. So I guess all I’m saying is there are lots of different explanations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of which are management, some of which are not, that all are feasible, but may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or may not be indicative of a fundamental problem at Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I still agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you, Marco, that I still agree with you that there is a possibility that something is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good, and it certainly seems that way, but man, it’s hard for us to tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and ultimately, we don’t need to tell. Like, again, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t know unless they both talk, like which I can’t imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We can’t know what the cause here was and what it means. Like again, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one incident, this one person leaving is not itself a massive deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we don’t know these things, right? It might be a massive deal but we can’t say, right? Because we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know. I’m just talking about like the overall pattern, like the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trend of the graph, you know, the the way things are going, it just seems like we’re getting increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more problems where the explanation could be something’s wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it might not be, for any one of those problems, it might not be that. But there sure are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot building up. Basically, I don’t know how anybody could be a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big Apple fan and look at the way things are right now and not be a little bit worried.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you don’t care about the Mac, I’m not quite sure you’d be that worried because I still think iPhones and iPads are great.
⏹️ ▶️ John The iPad is the best it’s ever been. The iPhone is arguably the best it’s ever been if you don’t mind the case look the same
⏹️ ▶️ John three years in a row. So if you don’t care about the Mac, I think Apple’s still doing pretty well. I mean, like, but
⏹️ ▶️ John getting back to what I was saying before about the state of the internals of Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ John the parts that we actually do know about because enough time has passed. Like, think of when, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Tony Fidel, father of the iPhone apparently didn’t get along with a lot of people inside Apple and eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John got booted out and then you have Scott Forstall who was he not getting along with? Johnny Ive or something?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Everybody it sounded like.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then Steve liked him like it was a friggin mess in there and people were leaving and getting kicked out and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like if he stays then I’m not gonna stay and they had to make these hard choices between two people who are arguably you know how do
⏹️ ▶️ John you kick out the guy who you know was the origins of the iPod project? It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John well but he disagrees with this other person who’s even more important to the company it’s like what can you do? Like they’re doing the best they can
⏹️ ▶️ John and yet during that time the company was producing the iPhone for crying out loud. So you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John good old Ed Catmull, success hides problems. Or you know, or Bob Mansfield and him leaving and then coming
⏹️ ▶️ John back. Like, there’s always been a lot of drama at the visible top levels of the things, but nobody cares when you’re releasing
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone. But go a few years and don’t have an iPhone like it. And then all of a sudden, now we’re going to look at
⏹️ ▶️ John your all your high level departures and wring our hands about them. And, you know, I’m not I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t endorse the political infighting and personality disagreements
⏹️ ▶️ John among these multi-millionaire city-level executives. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a Silicon Valley sport that I’m not really interested in engaging in, but the proof is in the pudding.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can have an apparently personally dysfunctional upper ranks of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and produce great products, and I’m assuming you could have everybody getting along but the company going down
⏹️ ▶️ John the tubes. So I’m not, that’s why I’m hesitant to connect those two things. Both
⏹️ ▶️ John because I have no visibility into it and also because I think maybe it’s not even connected. Maybe you have the
⏹️ ▶️ John most dysfunctional group of children fighting with each other and produce a world shattering
⏹️ ▶️ John product at the same time. I mean, Steve Jobs certainly wasn’t the most, you know, pleasant person to
⏹️ ▶️ John get along with and they did a lot of good work under him too. So fair enough. We are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsored tonight by Betterment. We are sponsored tonight by Betterment.
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Future of Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Betterment, investing made better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the only thing that I still think is worth discussing here is what does this mean for Swift?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of us is really enthusiastic about Swift and I’m curious what this means.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it sounds like if you were to read, if you were to take Chris’s mailing list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post, mailing it at face value, it sounds like Ted Kramenick has been doing all the work anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, if I were Chris and I wanted a smooth transition and I wanted to be a nice guy, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give all the credit to whoever’s taking over. But there’s presumably some amount of truth to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And unfortunately, while I do write Swift every day, I don’t follow the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ins and outs, day to day, you know, stuff that goes on. So I personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have a good feel for how much of this is true or false. But I mean, this is the, Latner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the daddy. What was, what do they call, is it the Python guy that has a really funny nickname?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a really funny nickname. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, you should know this
⏹️ ▶️ John Python is like pearl, right? I don’t follow Python Guido I don’t know what a widow’s nickname is.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s like supreme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ruler of it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, maybe that’s it maybe that’s it so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, so so Latin or is sort of the benevolent benevolent dictator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for life and now what We can debate whether his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full-time job at Apple was was working on Swift I mean, given that he had a hundred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people under him and from his own website, in additional languages Swift and Objective-C, compilers and low-level
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tools that took on responsibility for the Xcode IDE, instruments, performance analysis tool, Apple Java releases, and a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey variety of internal tools. It doesn’t sound like Latner’s full-time job was Swift anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but how much time is he really going to have to dedicate to it if he’s working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full-time at Tesla? Is that a problem? Is that just a change?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it seems like he’s let this this beautiful bird fly on its own and and and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’s you know Let go of the leash, but I don’t know. It’s it’s slightly alarming right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s it’s a change no matter how
⏹️ ▶️ John you slice it Well, he he was not benevolent dictator for life,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but everyone’s a care for life
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m familiar with this concept because it was adopted by the pearl community as well and it was bestowed on Larry Wall
⏹️ ▶️ John as an interesting way for nerds to to deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with uh, you know, to deal with each other and consensus building and everything, to have
⏹️ ▶️ John one trusted person who everyone agrees both has a
⏹️ ▶️ John a credible claim to dictatorship, like they invented the language in the case of Larry Wall,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, you know, well if one guy’s going to be in charge of Pearl it’s going to be Larry Wall, right? And also has
⏹️ ▶️ John proven to be like level-headed and reasonable, uh, you know, and like that everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John agrees, like you may agree with Larry Wall or disagree with him but we think he’s a a reasonable person. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John bless him as benevolent dictator for life. And then you have an open source process where everyone argues with each other and tries to come to
⏹️ ▶️ John some consensus. But every once in a while, there’s some big disagreement about some big important thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it has to go to, you know, the ultimate tiebreaker. And you defer everyone agrees that we all
⏹️ ▶️ John agree we’re going to defer to the benevolent dictator for life. And that person makes the call.
⏹️ ▶️ John And hopefully that rarely happens. And most of the time, the open source community works out among themselves. But you have this one person as
⏹️ ▶️ John the backstop as the tiebreaker, as the one that everyone agrees is the authority
⏹️ ▶️ John and has a rightful claim to make the decision. But, and that person part of being benevolent is
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t use that power. They don’t abuse that power. They don’t use it to override other people. They wait to be called upon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most of the time they defer to the community when there’s consensus. Like that’s the benevolent part. It’s really important. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is, by the way, a terrible system for government because as we all know, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John should not do this. But in open source projects, in these specific cases with these specific people who are really nice nerds,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I assume Guido is and I know Larry is, it has worked out. But that’s not what Chris Nottner
⏹️ ▶️ John is in the Swift open source community. It’s a much more democratic process. Now here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John twist. He’s kind of a de facto, he was kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of a de facto benevolent dictator for term of employment at Apple because
⏹️ ▶️ John he was the boss of the most powerful contributors to the code. So
⏹️ ▶️ John he was their boss in the company, which is a powerful position, right? They kind of had to do what he said because he was their boss.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they were working on Swift on Apple employee time, like not just in their free time as their hobby or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he would be leading the meetings discussing the community proposals for the Swift language.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the impression from the outside, at least is that Chris would deliver the result of those meetings. We had a meeting about this
⏹️ ▶️ John proposal. This is a community proposal, the swift evolution processes you propose and then the swift core team
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever the call if we go with this probably some name for this you know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that they have like a
⏹️ ▶️ John governance process we decide whether your proposal will be adopted or not and then Chris usually
⏹️ ▶️ John especially in the beginning or right to list say the core team met here’s here were our comments here
⏹️ ▶️ John was the conclusion we made the problem with that is the core team had a lot of Apple employees on it and
⏹️ ▶️ John Chris was their boss so even though he was not anointed as the benevolent dictator for
⏹️ ▶️ John life, it seemed like he had a… let’s say he had a larger influence
⏹️ ▶️ John on decisions related to the Swift language than any other single person, which I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think anyone would argue with. It doesn’t mean he was like he was in charge of everything and made every decision. Far from it. Like, he mostly, like a
⏹️ ▶️ John good benevolent dictator might, deferred to the community. And in fact, the process
⏹️ ▶️ John does not have him in an anointed position of controlling everything, which means as he leaves Apple, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s going to now have less control over the evolution of Swift than he did before, but in actuality
⏹️ ▶️ John he was never a benevolent dictator for life. That’s not how Swift’s open source effort looks. And so to get back to Casey’s question,
⏹️ ▶️ John what does this mean for Swift? I think Swift will be fine. It may end up going in a different direction
⏹️ ▶️ John than it would have gone in had Chris stayed at Apple, but that’s not necessarily a worse direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there are so many smart, good people working on Swift, both inside
⏹️ ▶️ John and outside of Apple that I, you know, and especially with the force of Apple behind it, if Apple remains dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ John to Swift, as they seem to be over these past many years, it will be perfectly fine. The
⏹️ ▶️ John only change will be is that it may end up going in slightly different directions than it would have gone if Chris was there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But who’s to say whether that’s good or bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what is he doing for Tesla? I mean, I understand what it said on the tin that he’s going to be what was a VP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of autopilot software. But why Latner? Like what, what do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you think he brings, he uniquely brings to the table?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think that’s pretty easy. Like if you look at his resume, like he came to Apple as this guy who started this, uh, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, C++ compiler building toolkit, right. And took that
⏹️ ▶️ John into a company that already had an entire ID and tool chain for developing for the new operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system and slowly but surely replace their compiler from the bottom up first
⏹️ ▶️ John by cloning it and then replacing it entirely. And then, you know, by by proving the worth of
⏹️ ▶️ John his little compiler thing, I can use my little compiler tools to help you in this area of the company, I can use it to compile
⏹️ ▶️ John shaders in a platform agnostic format, I can,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, rip out the guts of the back end of GCC and replace it with this thing. And I can replace all GCC with
⏹️ ▶️ John my own compiler. And then guess what, I’ve been looking at your language, it’s kind of crap, I can replace that to that
⏹️ ▶️ John type of being able to come into an organization and eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John solve, you know, huge organization community ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ John spanning problems is, you know, that’s a hell of a resume. That’s a unique ability. So you’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John drop this person into this project, you know, in some respects, Tesla is so much
⏹️ ▶️ John simpler and more narrow than Apple, because Apple has so many stakeholders and so many
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated things. And you know, software development ecosystem. Tesla’s just got cars at this point. I mean, you know, at
⏹️ ▶️ John least that’s the only one he’s going to be involved in. He’s not in solar roofs or whatever, right? They’ve got cars and he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a specific aspect of the cars, not all aspects of the cars, just the self driving part, which again is a huge problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if anyone can get dropped into that situation and figure out how to make a team of people successful
⏹️ ▶️ John at accomplishing the goals put before them, uh, you know, he’s proven that he can do that in the context of a big,
⏹️ ▶️ John important company with millions of customers. Now, how much of that, how much that experience translates
⏹️ ▶️ John to cars, I don’t really know. But if you know, if the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John the team is currently having has anything to do with tools, languages, compilers or anything he has any familiarity
⏹️ ▶️ John with, he can hit the ground running. And even if it doesn’t, he’s smart and he’s proven he can navigate large
⏹️ ▶️ John organizations and get things done. So you know, I feel like he’s a no brainer hire to
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody who wants who has a some some portion of their product that involves software
⏹️ ▶️ John and need someone to lead that effort because he’s he’s showing he can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, imagine if Tesla wanted to have a single language that could go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from, you know, embedded systems all the way up to server side programming.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If only there was a man who had or woman who had invented such a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would be so convenient to have hired.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not entirely sure he’ll be using Swift Tesla. Maybe he will. Maybe he won’t, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the software staff looks like for self-driving car tech at this point. Yeah, neither do I.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I think maybe that’s part of why he would be so valuable to them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is if you look at like the kinds of, like, you know, most programmers, you know, people like me, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the work I do, it’s almost unimportant whether I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get my code correct or not. Like it’s like, does it work most of the time? Yes. Okay, good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that applies to almost every working programmer. Very few programmers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really need to get things correct all the time, or it really matters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you look at the job of autopilot software, this is a really big deal. People’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lives are at stake. That’s on the order of space shuttle software.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This really has to be correct. And not only does a compiler author
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have similarly high requirements, right? Because compilers really have to be correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t have a bug in a compiler. That’s a really bad thing for a lot of people. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that really has to be. So not only that, but Chris has also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco proven himself to be really good at making tools to tell whether your code is correct,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do things like static analysis and things like that. That was all him too, right? Or at least rooted
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was all LVM tech enabling those features. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, like, that’s if you look at, like, the specific needs of autopilot software,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that needs somebody leading it who is both really good at writing correct code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also able to improve the correctness of the code of the rest of the organization.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s an interesting point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. The only thing that gives me pause here is that, like, everything he did at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John were things that if you were to present the possibility of doing them to
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody else you know, versed in the art as the legalese thing go
⏹️ ▶️ John in patent law, they would be like yeah that’s a possible, it’s possible to do that right? Self-driving cars
⏹️ ▶️ John are still in the realm of nobody has done it yet, like we’ve come close, we’re getting better, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this, but like it’s not a straightforward thing, it’s not even clear what the correct approach is.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean there was a good YouTube video I saw that day, but someone gave a presentation all the different problems of self-driving cars
⏹️ ▶️ John and different approaches. And you know, one of the ones being promoted by Nvidia of all companies, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they sell GPUs that do it, it’s like the neural net type of thing where instead of, uh, the Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ John way, which seems more straightforward and programmatic, instead you get this, you know, this learning network
⏹️ ▶️ John that you train, right? And you don’t even, you’re not even really programming it. You’re just kind of treating it
⏹️ ▶️ John like a little, a little living thing. And you don’t even know how it works internally. You just know what the the results are,
⏹️ ▶️ John um, and you can train it in the real world and in simulations or whatever, like versus the approach of
⏹️ ▶️ John having a rule based approach where it’s a lots of sensors, lots of rules and lots of intelligence and,
⏹️ ▶️ John and systems conversing with each other and coming to consensus, but in an explicable way, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s more of the Tesla approach right now, which I think Chris is, you know, better suited to manage
⏹️ ▶️ John a project like that because it fits more with, uh, his other things. He’s not, as far as I know, an academic
⏹️ ▶️ John versed on machine learning and neural networks and and stuff, right? So that’s a good fit. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were to go to somebody and say, Hey, can you take that approach and build self driving software
⏹️ ▶️ John that gets good enough that you can remove the steering wheel from cars? Nobody knows because nobody’s done it, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John that is that’s both exciting. It’s an exciting challenge, right? But also, it’s a big question
⏹️ ▶️ John mark. I mean, in addition to the question mark of like, hey, will Tesla still be in business? Will they run out of money?
⏹️ ▶️ John Will somebody buy them? Because there’s one thing you have to worry about at Apple, at least in the short term is, will I
⏹️ ▶️ John will they be able to pay my paycheck? Answer? Yes. Tesla, on the other hand, has not actually been making money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not sure when the prospects of them making money is. And I’m not sure whether they’ll be bought or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re looking for, you know, it’s exciting in many levels, you’re looking for a challenge. This is definitely a challenge. I’m just not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John sure that Chris has any more of a chance of solving this problem. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if the if the correct approach turns out to be like the neural net thing. And that’s not the approach Tesla’s taking.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s not going to do it and someone else is. But if it is the right approach, and it can be done,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess he’s got a puncher’s chance, right? It’s just, it’s a much bigger question mark
⏹️ ▶️ John than, can you figure out how to fix Apple’s compiler infrastructure and make a new language that
⏹️ ▶️ John will be backward compatible with Objective C and also work with, you know, like, he did a great
⏹️ ▶️ John job and that is a tremendously hard problem but it is a thing that has been done before in different forms
⏹️ ▶️ John versus self-driving cars which is this big you know pie-in-the-sky question mark at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to my three sponsors this week HelloFresh, Betterment, and and Squarespace, and we will see you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show notes at
⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s accidental, they didn’t mean
Post-show: Blog engines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How is John not using Swift yet? Why the hell would he? Because he basically caused it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist. Pffft. I wouldn’t go that far. Seriously, how
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Well, I would use it if I had occasion to use it, but I don’t have occasion to use it at work,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t have time for anything at home because I’m always podcasting. I just added support
⏹️ ▶️ John for a certain feature that Marco is aware of to my blog recently, but my blog is not written in Swift.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey didn’t exist
⏹️ ▶️ John when I made it, and I haven’t touched it since, and it’s a pile of crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, apparently you touched it somehow to add this feature. Well, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was not that big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a feature. It would be like the programmer thing to do to spend more time on the engine than on writing posts.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I still have achieved that goal, because I write so few posts that I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey still come out ahead. Good point.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. Anyway, at this point, I’m such a high-level language dilettante
⏹️ ▶️ John that I just can’t bear to deal with anything that even, I know Swift is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know, not down in the muck, but… Right, what is too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey low for you within Swift?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got unsafe stuff in there, you know? Yeah, but you don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John God’s sakes. I know, but sometimes you do, depending on what frameworks you want to use with it. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and types, and like another high-level
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing is not having to worry so
⏹️ ▶️ John types. Oh, types, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John rough, John. And, you know, any moment of my life I spend wrangling a type system, I feel like is a wasted
⏹️ ▶️ John moment because I’m so used
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to not doing it. Oh my God, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, so hold on. I know. You’re using Perl, I assume, as your holy grail here.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it is not a holy grail. But JavaScript is the same way, where you have to worry less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Less. Oh, my God. Obviously, you have to worry about them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhat. Not true. Oh, my God. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Less than Swift, certainly. John, as a JavaScript fan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like JavaScript. And even I will tell you that appealing to authority with JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ John there. It’s not appealing to authority. I’m just saying it’s a language that I use that has has the same characteristics in that you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to type everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so go back to your earlier complaint about unsafe things. You’re using Perl. Perl is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just calling out to libraries written in C half the time. So like, you- Yeah, but they all work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, yeah. OK. Right, so like-
⏹️ ▶️ John Time tested. Not modified for the past 15 years. Yeah, that’s, yeah. OK.
⏹️ ▶️ John The great thing about using a language like that, though, by the way, as I’ve said many times, is when it’s segfaults, it’s not your fault.
⏹️ ▶️ John That should be a slogan on, you know, if Perl was still a popular language, people could put it on a wall. Segfaults,
⏹️ ▶️ John not your fault. Whereas when you get segfaults, Marco, guess what? It’s your fault. But you do that in
⏹️ ▶️ John Perl, it’s like, nah, I couldn’t have done anything to cause that because I’m writing Perl. It’s some stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John C programmer’s problem, and you’re right. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get segfaults. I get like, you know, uncaught exceptions and things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, everyone’s got a different name.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Null pointer
⏹️ ▶️ John exceptions in Java, yes, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, Marco doesn’t have that problem. I do, but it’s all within the Swift compiler segfaulting left
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco was saying before, compilers, those can’t have bugs. I can feel everyone on the Swift mailing list saying, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, compilers never have bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I was referring more to the generated code. But yeah, I know about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re right. The standard is higher, which is why when there is a bug, it’s noteworthy. But in the world of Swift’s compiler,
⏹️ ▶️ John we are still definitely in the realm of regularly having actual bugs in the compiler.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Otherwise, all those people
⏹️ ▶️ John at Apple working on Swift compiler would never anything to do but rest assured that they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, let me tell you type inferences magical until it stops working and then it’s the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you’re worrying about types.
⏹️ ▶️ John The correct argument against JavaScript for types is all their inane coercions
⏹️ ▶️ John that like they made a few bad choices with coercions and truth value Ness. And it’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone has all the religion about triple equals because they just want to avoid any of that stuff because it behaves in ways that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s what drives me nuts. Like people have written off PHP entirely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for exactly that kind of thing. And now they’re all using JavaScript. It has the same problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they’re not using JavaScript because they love it. You know why they’re using JavaScript. They have no choice because it’s in every freaking
⏹️ ▶️ John people who use Node? They have a choice. No, they don’t. Because the reason they’re using the reason they’re using JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ John on the server side is because it’s used in the client side. And when you can share code between the client side and the server side, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John a win. And also because Node is actually a reasonable way to do async stuff server side,
⏹️ ▶️ John as compared to the other languages that offer similar features. But totally, it’s like JavaScript wins, not because anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John loves it, but because you gotta use it because it’s in the frigging browser.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I chose Node willingly. I could have done Ruby when I wrote Camel. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I chose Node because- Yeah, but it would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been slower. Node is faster. And it never would have scaled for those millions and millions of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John hits I get every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, I chose Node because I was familiar with JavaScript, but I didn’t, I mean, I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t even know. Yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ John why were you familiar with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JavaScript? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of the web, for sure. Exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s why. A little bit slow down though, but I don’t have jQuery on 99% of the blog posts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I write. In fact, I don’t even have it on the standard template because I use it so
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, but you know the language, and you know little bits of the standard library, and you know kinda how the regular
⏹️ ▶️ John expression things work, and yeah, JavaScript is a mess. Have you done any
⏹️ ▶️ John ES6 stuff in JavaScript?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No. Where they
⏹️ ▶️ John tried to make it less of a mess?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, nor have I touched TypeScript or CoffeeScript
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or any of that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Next time you do something in Node, upgrade to a reasonably recent version of Node and do the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole thing in ES6 and see how you feel about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, to be honest, I really want to convert Camel from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey static-ish to full-bore static, like you two knuckleheads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. and I started, I have a branch with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanting to move away from that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but go ahead. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, I wanna go back to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John server-based,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to dynamic generation. Basically, I have some experience with web scalability.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, the language speed is never your problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If that’s your problem, you are not doing something right. Dynamic serve pages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be almost as fast as a static site, sort of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through Nginx, if you do it right, if you have things like, you know, like what all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers do to serve static pages quickly, you have things like caching, you know, like the basic caching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco required. Like, we’re getting into an era now where, where I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like as the web is shifting into the new era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of mobile and whatever else, I think we more than ever need things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publishing API support so we can use tools on the go and stuff like that, as well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as various dynamic format generation like AMP and whatever garbage is thrust upon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us in the future. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers are so cheap and powerful now, and web traffic is pretty much down for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s getting increasingly harder to justify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco static only site generation when a decently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco written, conscientious, modern, dynamic application can do things just as well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and provide some pretty nice benefits for the world of mobile.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you do a static site, you lose the opportunity for a programming bug to make
⏹️ ▶️ John your site unresponsive. And so we go back to doing dynamic, you finally get that ability back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How complex is your blog CMS, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John now I can now I can make a programming error that you know brings me back to the good old days when sites
⏹️ ▶️ John would get slashed out of it whereas if it’s static the worst you can do is make your site look ugly because your static generator produced a bunch of crap
⏹️ ▶️ John but that ugliness will load real
⏹️ ▶️ John PHP why you think you why because it can also make things ugly I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know well that too but no I mean I honestly like modern web languages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and tool chains and and stacks are really fast you’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John fast they are. I know I’m just saying you make it you make a programming error that causes like you put you put something that goes
⏹️ ▶️ John into an infinite loop somewhere and then all of your your uh you know child processes get tied up in the infinite loop
⏹️ ▶️ John and now you have no more responders and and you know like it’s an error you’re not doing it on purpose not saying it’s performing correctly
⏹️ ▶️ John but when you have no code you just have static files you that whole class of errors is gone
⏹️ ▶️ John and so that’s I mean that’s why people do static stuff it’s like well um it will have predictable performance
⏹️ ▶️ John right and there’s nothing I can do to mess up that predictable performance because I’m not serving the files, you know, NGINX
⏹️ ▶️ John is or Apache is and I haven’t upgraded it in 17 years and it’s just doing what it always does and it is 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John predictable. Once you add your own code to the mix, you open up the window however small for you making a
⏹️ ▶️ John silly programmer error that causes your thing to hang when it gets much traffic or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you might be overestimating the complexity of a PHP blog engine. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said it’s a good thing like it’s not very hard. There’s not much code and there’s not much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opportunity for things like infinite loops.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, there’s always opportunity for infinite loops. Just you can do that in a regular expression for crying out loud.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Not an infinite loop. No, John,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you could. But I hate the death of the universe. A Perl
⏹️ ▶️ Marco programmer can do that with a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John regular expression. Anybody, even a
⏹️ ▶️ John PHP, even a JavaScript programmer can make a regular
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco expression. No way. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, does PHP only use DFAs in its reg extension? Do you know what that is? I don’t even know what that means.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone in the chat room
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco will know and tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me the answer. Discrete finite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John autonoma? deterministic
⏹️ ▶️ John the the non-deterministic finite autonomous the ones are the ones that you can make a regular expression that tries like
⏹️ ▶️ John a bazillion permutations of how to match and it won’t succeed or fail in you know for
⏹️ ▶️ John a huge amount of time so it effectively looks like a hang
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are using regular expressions to that level of complexity you’re you might be using the wrong tool for the job
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not it’s not a complex thing it’s really you can you can make a trivial example with like six characters with just
⏹️ ▶️ John like characters and pluses and a couple of friends and you can make one that it goes like that but but some regular expressions,
⏹️ ▶️ John I like egrep, I believe, from the command line, only those DFAs, and those don’t have that problem. But to use the
⏹️ ▶️ John fancier features that Perl has in its regups engine, you have to have an NFA engine in there as well. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Perl switches between them uses the DFA when it’s faster. And anyway, this is all esoteric. But the point is,
⏹️ ▶️ John infinite loops are everywhere, if you look hard enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What are you doing with your blog? Like, honestly, like, like, I’ve written a number of blog CMSs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, ill advisedly over the years, and, and I don’t think I’ve ever even needed anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that complex. Like, what are you doing? I’m not doing anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have static files. I’m just saying you’ve seen it done. I mean, the most common case is what you said before that someone doesn’t, someone either
⏹️ ▶️ John implements caching wrong or doesn’t implement it at all. And then you get to see like their MySQL connection errors, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John get slashed out of like the bad old days. It’s not like the language isn’t fast enough. It’s like they didn’t realize that they
⏹️ ▶️ John might need to have 7,000 simultaneous connections to their MySQL database and they didn’t do any form of caching and
⏹️ ▶️ John their page gets popular and all you get to see is the, is there a lovely MySQL error on a white error page. like, remember
⏹️ ▶️ John those days? That used to happen a lot. That still happens. I know, well, that’s the magic
⏹️ ▶️ John of a dynamically generated website, combined with,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you know. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like it’s, that is not. Yeah, I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should do caching, but you know, then you gotta worry about cache invalidation, and it’s just another, it’s a whole class of bugs that doesn’t exist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sites. No, you don’t, you know what you can do? Like, because of the scale we’re talking about here, like, the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple caching in the world works just fine. You know what you do? You put a caching proxy in front of your application,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and your application sends a cache header with a TTL of one second. Because then it will,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in most cases, only ever have to generate one page per second dynamically, which they can all do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can be serving that to 1,000 people per second on the front end and it’s fine, because the caching server can do that. You
⏹️ ▶️ John still get cache stampedes though. You can still get stampedes for when the one second expires and like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Only for badly written caching servers. We have better ones now, they
⏹️ ▶️ John avoid that. But there are so many ways you can screw this up, that’s what I’m saying. But the reason people do that
⏹️ ▶️ John static sites is because it eliminates this entire class of performance related problems. And you trade it for the other problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is that your site takes longer to update. And potentially, you could host your entire site if you make a bug there. But that
⏹️ ▶️ John trade-off is why people do static sites.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re more limited in the kind of features your site can support, which sometimes can be important.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, although you can have your site be entirely static and just have a little sub URL be dynamic. But anyway, Casey’s proof of this,
⏹️ ▶️ John because his node site was 100% dynamic, right? You were doing the stupidest dynamic thing ever. Like, were you doing any
⏹️ ▶️ John caching or were you just caching it in memory? Whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it was, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey How do you really feel?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not stupid, like the most
⏹️ ▶️ John naive. Like it wasn’t like you were going through great
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco efforts to have some… Oh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much better. You’re not stupid, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re naive. Yeah, really. I feel like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John million bucks right
⏹️ ▶️ John now. Naive is a term of art. A
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey naive approach to serving pages. To answer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your question, what happens is the first time… Actually, it’s upon load, basically when the engine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is spun up, it looks through the file system. And it looks at a bunch of markdown files,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey converts those to HTML, renders full bore HTML for each page, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey holds that in memory. So in principle, once the thing is spun up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it should never have to think about anything again. It just has to figure out where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in memory that that that page is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so that I mean, obviously, that approach doesn’t work recite with a billion pages on it like archive.org
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, but it works fine for a blog. And it’s technically dynamic, because it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hitting the disk every time you make a request, right? But it’s also basically static. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? And that’s exactly the point. Like, what did I put on the readme? Where did that go? I just had this damn window
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe it’s in an infinite loop, and you can’t find it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s the you know what, I think you’re right. I think that’s exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ll send you guys some some good infinite loop breakers. Right? I gotta find out maybe JavaScript doesn’t suffer from this. It wouldn’t be surprised to me if JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ John is all DFA is because I suspected I would see more of it on the web if it was a thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this conversation was probably meant to have me start learning Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but now instead I just want to do the worst possible use of my time because I want to write a new blogging engine in PHP.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t you write a new blogging engine in Swift? Combine two into one. Are the server-side frameworks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Because honestly, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John so. There’s a bunch of projects that, I mean, I’m sure they’re not mature or probably even good,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think you can get the job done. Because like you said, blogging engine is not that complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The one that IBM is working on, from what I understand, isn’t bad. I can’t remember the name off the top of my head.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very easy to do this kind of thing in one of the very popular old languages,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like PHP, or Python, or Ruby, because there’s libraries to do everything that blogs ever need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, markdown processors, things like that. That’s really easy to just bolt on, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s right there. There’s a million libraries to do it, and it’s great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, that’s the thing. Yeah, so I am curious, and things like image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resizing, thumbnailing if that’s ever necessary, stuff like that. The kind of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that blog CMSs tend to need. It’s fairly simple, but there are a few components that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are somewhat complex, and it’s nice to have good support for them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a webby type of language that’s been around for a while. Things like PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Ruby and Python, Those have tons of good libraries out there for that kind of stuff. Something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s brand new or that hasn’t been really used in a web context very much, like Swift.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve also had this problem with Go, honestly. Go has a lot of built-in libraries for stuff like math
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff, but once you get into more webby type needs, you very quickly hit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walls of like, oh, there just isn’t a library to do this, or there’s this one library that just shells out to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obscure C library that won’t compile, or whatever else. I’ve had a lot of issues with Go in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that regard. But yeah. I’m kinda down on Go now, honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel like Swift kinda did Go better than Go. And so now I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kinda want Swift to be on the server so I could just use that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Should try Rust next. Maybe Rust has better server-side libraries. I don’t know anything about their library situation
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s in a similar vein if you’re into those type of languages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I haven’t looked at Rust recently. I did look at it like about two years ago but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would expect it might have the same issues as Go, where it probably doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of those rich client-side libraries, because I think it’s more of a low-level thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it is also very new and not incredibly popular yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, there’s a couple of different options for Swift. There’s Taylor, which is funny, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just woefully badly named, because then you’re searching for Taylor Swift. There’s Perfect, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s Katura, which is, well, perfect is just an obnoxious name. And then Ketura,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is probably the best kind of name because I’ve never heard that word used anywhere else before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so that theoretically should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. Does perfect have a bug tracker?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, I would assume so. That’s funny as hell. That’s on GitHub, so yes, it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The first heading, what is perfect? I think in my head, like nothing. I don’t know, not this, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing is so perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco uh… there you know uh…
⏹️ ▶️ John sleeper uh… an issue on their face that bugs their issues issue number