SwiftUI: Does it [Still] Suck?
From HyperCard to Gtk to Cocoa to UIKit, and now a from-scratch app in SwiftUI and Swift 6. Less code, sure, but I keep wondering if SwiftUI exists because it can rather than because it should, and whether it will just homogenize every app into the same three templates.
![SwiftUI: Does it [Still] Suck?](/content/images/size/w1200/2025/11/jurassic-swiftui.jpg)
I used HyperCard in the late-80s and early-90s to make some fun applications and animations. It still amazes me that Myst was implemented in HyperCard. As kids, we did more with HyperCard than I've ever seen kids doing these days.
I used Gtk with Perl to craft some simple visual programs. Then there was Java, which was my first foray into UI toolkits that tried to be "write once, run anywhere". I learned how this will never be a thing. Never. Apple bought NeXT and I started learning Objective-C and Cocoa (was it called Cocoa back then? I think it was. I stayed away from Carbon.). In 2008, as a Cocoa developer, I got a gig doing iPhoneOS development with UIKit.
Finally, most recently, Apple released SwiftUI. What a paradigm shift. Early versions strongly sucked. I had dabbled in SwiftUI as the opportunity presented itself, but very recently I started a from-scratch app with SwiftUI (and Swift 6). Some of the learning curve I'm dealing with is the data concurrency changes in Swift 6, and not just SwiftUI.
