Robin Rendle’s thoughts on iOS development provides some savvy insights into the mind of a web developer experiencing the world of software development:

Next steps are difficult to find though. You can’t move without watching a million videos or reading the docs: UIKit, MapKit, SwiftUI, Motion, animations. This is true if I create a .html file in VSCode but there’s also fifteen years of tinkering I can rely on. I know what HTML and CSS is capable of so I don’t need to ask questions every thirty seconds about how to style something or move its position.

The level of comfort I feel with HTML and CSS and my reliance on the separation of presentation and logic is hard to overstate.

This is a good reminder that the tools look simple to us web developers but they are very much not easy for newcomers to the field.

100%. I’ve always felt that the two worlds of web development and software development didn’t know how to talk to each other. You were forced to learn new paradigms to achieve similar effects.

Anyway, there’s nothing in XCode that opens a door into these worlds or shows you what’s next. Nothing hints at what’s possible. You have to leave the editor to go explore and it totally kills the flow of exploration to ask a bot or a search engine how to add padding or color every three seconds. It’s like someone is slamming a door in your face over and over again.

I wanna be like: here’s some tabs on the screen! Okay, now show me all the ways I can customize those! Or show me how to animate them! Loop through the items and filter them or list out all the appearance options and frameworks I can tinker with! Show me the doors!

I always wondered this, why is it so tough to get context sensitive understanding of the UI in software development tools? For instance, why are some editors so insistent on using JSON files to edit settings? GUIs provide discoverability in a way that a blank blinking cursor does not.

Autocomplete today is insufficient and I think the main reason why folks rely on Copilot or asking a bot is because these tools are really extraordinarily bad at showing you what’s possible and then how to do it.

In fact, it goes beyond autocomplete. It’s like having someone over my shoulder able to point in precise detail what is happening, where its happening, and why its happening, over and over again, generating my own custom Stack Overflow article for my personal use case. That’s addicting and rewarding.

Honestly, I could spend time quoting the entire article and how it sings to me and my development style. It’s worth your attention, definitely take the time to read it.