I’m one of the engineers that spearheaded this initiative inside of Apple. I just wanted to thank the HN community—I’ve been reading HN for 10 years now and it’s been formative in my development as a software engineer. If you’re at WWDC stop by the labs and say hi!
It seemed crazy and old school to me to have the UI stuff that IB generates stored in XML - I definitely thought it should generate the same code that you would write to do it programmatically.
Also, the code for building UIs programmatically has been so unnecessarily complicated. Like building a collection view with all the functions needed and boilerplate code compared to the few lines we saw in the demo.
This seems so simple and declarative. It makes me feel a lot better about my future as an app developer. Thanks again!