Live data from Hacker News

Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

holdtherobot.com

71–80 of 155 posts

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#71

That first error isn’t an Xcode issue. It’s a Swift compiler issue. And you can’t blame your IDE for your bad instincts—at some point those ritualistic fixes stopped being necessary and I haven’t had to do them for more than half a decade. You really should be digging into your code using breakpoints and logging to find the root cause. I do think Xcode has very rough edges but if we’re criticizing it, we have to crit…

Wouldn’t a breakpoint or log message require the code to compile and run in order to work?

You're right, parent's comment is just wrong.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#73
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that actually true for Microsoft? How they've evolved .NET and VS Code is amazing. You can make a PR on Microsoft's repos, someone actually pays attention, you get to talk and worth with Microsoft employees, and they merge things in. Microsoft is leaps and bounds more open than Google and Apple when it comes to development tooling.

Microsoft developer tooling is usually pretty great IME. It's being a user that mostly sucks

[deleted]

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#74

I was going to defend Xcode and say it's not that bad... but then I read the article and realised that I have just become so accustomed to these problems that I don't consciously realise the daily hellfire that I experience. Even when you think you're immune to it, Stockholm syndrome is real. A similar article I wrote on the 'Dark Side' of Apple Development, brings up many additional issues: https://www.magiclasso.co…

The first rule of Stockholm Club, is you don't know you are in Stockholm Club.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#75
post #5

Apple has always been famously anti-developer. They write terrible documentation, too. You're supposed to suck up to them to get access to their precious users. Everything in this article is a reason to stay away from everything proprietary about Apple development. If there is some software that can't be delivered with open web technology or an existing game engine, I'd like to know what it is.

FWIW, I've been developing on the mac for about twenty years now, and I think they're at worst in the middle of developer experiences. I prefer it to working with eg GTK and JS/HTML/CSS (though, CSS does have its sweet spots). The worst part is that they can be agonizingly slow to fix very obvious bugs. The documentation could certainly be much worse, and there are so many eyes on their tools now it's in many ways much easier now to be productive than it used to be. The debugging and profiling is excellent.

I've never trued developing for windows so I could easily imagine it's better across the board.

It also helps if you don't need to go through their app stores, which is a hell of its own.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#76
post #62

I remember a long time ago writing simple macos apps you could use from the command line. The compile command was basically: gcc -o foo foo.m -framework Foundation I think everything developers do in apple's ecosystem is needlessly complicated.

you can totally still do this

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As daily user of Jetbrains’ software (and someone who agrees with TFA about xcode) I don’t want Apple anywhere near them

So as a daily user of Jetbrains software, who also finds XCode awful, you would not want XCode replaced by a Jetbrains project that isn't hacked together and reverse engineered like AppCode was? Or you just wanted to be dramatic?

This would result in every current JetBrains user in every other language on every other platform suffer. That's a pretty big chunk of all programmers everywhere

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#78
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, Android Studio is amazing because it's build by people who actually know how to make software (JetBrains) and it runs everywhere.

Provided one has 32 GB, with 16 real cores and a 1TB SSD ultra-fast.

I run it on a Thinkpad T530 from 2013. It's maxed out with a 256GB SATA2 SSD, 16GB of memory and a 3rd gen 4c8t i5.

Obviously the compiler and emulator (yes, emulator) are slow, but as an IDE it's perfectly functional.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#79

That first error isn’t an Xcode issue. It’s a Swift compiler issue. And you can’t blame your IDE for your bad instincts—at some point those ritualistic fixes stopped being necessary and I haven’t had to do them for more than half a decade. You really should be digging into your code using breakpoints and logging to find the root cause. I do think Xcode has very rough edges but if we’re criticizing it, we have to crit…

Wouldn’t a breakpoint or log message require the code to compile and run in order to work?

Yes but if you read the article, the point about developing bad instincts is a different context than the Swift compiler issues.

Re: Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t a breakpoint or log message require the code to compile and run in order to work?

You're right, parent's comment is just wrong.

You also didn’t read the article
Post reply on HN