There’s an old trope used in discussions of Mac and iOS developers, that says they’re too inward-looking. They only think about software in ways that have been “blessed” by Apple, their platform vendor. I’m pretty sure that I’ve used this meme myself though couldn’t find an example in a short Bing for the topic. It’s now time to put that meme out to pasture (though, please, not out to stud. We don’t want that thing breeding.)
“Apple-supplied” is a broad church
Since I’ve been using Macs, it’s included: C, C++, Objective-C, five different assemblers, Java, AppleScript, perl, python, ruby (both vanilla and MacRuby), Tcl, bash, csh, JavaScript, LISP and PHP. Perhaps more. Admittedly on the iOS side options are fewer: but do you know anyone who’s found their way around all of modern C++? You can be a programmer who never leaves the aforementioned collection of languages and yet is familiar with procedural, object-oriented, structured, functional and template programming techniques. There’s no need to learn Haskell just to score developer points.
There is more to heaven and earth
“The community” has actually provided even more options than those listed above. RubyMotion, MonoTouch, MonoMac, PhoneGap/Cordova, wxWidgets, Titanium: these and more provide options for developing for Apple’s platform with third party tools, languages and APIs. To claim that the Apple-based community is insular is to choose an exclusive subset of the community, ignoring all of the developers who, well, aren’t that insular subset. If playing that sort of rhetorical game is acceptable then we aren’t having grown-up discussions. Well, don’t blame me, you started it.
Find out how many iOS apps are built with C#, or LUA, or JavaScript, or Ruby. Now see if you can say with conviction that the community of iOS app developers pays attention to nothing outside the field of Objective-C.
Not everyone need be a generalist
Back when Fred Brooks was writing about the failures of the System/360 project in his book “The Mythical-Man Month” and the article “No Silver Bullet”, he suggested that instead of building armies of programmers to create software the focus should be on creating small, focussed surgical teams with a limited number of people assuming the roles required. The “surgeon” was played by the “chief programmer”, somewhere between a software architect and a middle manager.
One of the roles on these “chief programmer teams” was the language lawyer. It’s the job of the language lawyer to know the programming language and interfaces inside-out, to suggest smarter or more efficient ways of doing what’s required of the software. They’re also great at knowing what happens at edge-case uses of the language (remember the previous post on the various things that happen when you add one to an integer?) which is great for those last-minute debugging pushes towards the end of a project.
Having language lawyers is a good thing. If some people want to focus on knowing a small area of the field inside-out rather than having broader, but shallower, coverage, that’s a good thing. These are people who can do amazing things with real code on real projects.
It doesn’t help any discussion
Even if the statement were true, and if its truth in some way pointed to a weakness in the field and its practitioners, there are more valuable things to do than to express the statement. We need some internet-age name for the following internet-age rhetorical device:
I believe P is true. I state P. Therefore I have made the world better.
If you think that I haven’t considered some viewpoint and my way of working or interacting with other developers suffers as a result, please show that thing to me. Preferably in a friendly compelling fashion that explains the value. Telling me I’m blinkered may be true, but is unlikely to change my outlook. Indeed I may be inclined to find that distasteful and stop listening; the “don’t read the comments” meme is predicated on the belief that short, unkind statements are not worth paying attention too.
Conclusion
Absorption of external ideas does exist in our community, claiming that it doesn’t is a fallacy. Not everyone need learn everything about the entirety of software making in order to contribute; claiming that they should is a fallacy. Making either of these claims is in itself not helpful. Therefore there’s no need to continue on the “Apple developers are insular” meme, and I shan’t.
If you find exciting ideas from other areas of software development, share them with those who will absorb. Worry not about people who don’t listen, but rather wonder what they know and which parts of that you haven’t discovered yet.
