Craig Federighi talks to John Gruber about Swift | Hacker News Reader

Craig Federighi talks to John Gruber about Swift

daringfireball.net

120 pointsanderzole9 comments

The most fascinating part of this for me was how deeply technical Craig is. He's more than just pretty hair.

That actually carries over to most levels of management at Apple, the Managers are just really good Engineers with a few extra scheduling skills..

I'm always baffled why it's so common that the person in charge of something is often the person with the least direct knowledge about how it actually works.

It makes more sense to me that companies should be taking quality employees and providing them management training, as opposed to hiring somebody with a "management" degree who has little to no knowledge of the actual work that's done.

I guess that's just a symptom though of workers changing jobs more frequently.

"Doing X", and "Managing people doing X", are two pretty distinct skills—and interests. If you find someone really good at doing a thing, why would you pull them out of that position? Odds are they won't be good at it, and they won't enjoy it. There are people who enjoy both, but they're rare.

Exactly. Find someone not good at X then have them manage a dozen people doing X and pay them 50% more.

I'm reminded of Plato's Ship of State metaphor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_State) here whereby the people who come into power are not necessarily the most skilled, but instead those who are most skilled at getting into power. Nobody would disagree that somebody who is both good at management and of a strong technical mind would be the ideal candidate, but usually it is just somebody who is good at getting promoted.

This was also the case with Scott Forstall.

Bertrand Serlet too, who was the original author of OS X's malloc() implementation used during his tenure.

I read the transcript but at the end I wished they had touched upon some comparisons of Swift with C# and the open sourcing of the .NET platform by Microsoft. Craig's/Apple's comments on that would be interesting now that C# and .NET are also becoming truly cross platform (unlike the Mono platform that lagged behind), which is something Swift also aims to be, although we don't know what frameworks and libraries from Apple would or could become cross platform.

Also, C# and .NET have had longer than a decade to become what they are today. It would've been interesting to hear more details on what lessons and developments from the last decade and a half helped accelerate the development of Swift (not just from C#.NET, but also other languages and programming paradigms).

Chris Lattner's page [0] just mentions a one liner saying "...it also greatly benefited from the experiences hard-won by many other languages in the field, drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list."

A geeky interview with Chris Lattner might be the next thing to look forward to on this topic. :)

[0]: http://nondot.org/sabre/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com