Ban SwiftUI related questions

[ibex10]

I am pretty sure I am not the only person who finds them extremely distracting and polluting.

Is it possible to ban SwiftUI related questions on these forums, and automatically guide the posters to Apple Developer Forums?

[henrikac (Henrik Christensen)]

Why only ban SwiftUI related questions? Why not ban questions about ALL frameworks and libraries and only allow questions about the swift programming language?

[xwu (Xiaodi Wu)]

Is it ok to ask SwiftUI questions now?

I agree with @sveinhal that the invective is not appropriate, but just to be clear: there's no 'punishment' meted out for making off-topic posts other than possibly being redirected to the Apple Developer Forums and possibly having your post de-listed. A 'SwiftUI question' is one which does not hinge on any particular feature of the Swift language other than the fact that SwiftUI happens to be written in Swift. A question about "why am I getting this compiler error in my SwiftUI view?" is likel…

[Jumhyn (Frederick Kellison-Linn)]

One of the important takeaways from the thread and post that @xwu just linked is that it would be difficult to do this in any kind of automated fashion. Many developers only or primarily interact with Swift through SwiftUI or UIKit, and so it wouldn't be tenable to simply auto-ban any mention of the frameworks here.

Producing minimal examples of issues is hard and asking inexperienced developers to do the pre-work of removing any use of Apple framework APIs from their questions before posting is, IMO, much too high a bar. I wouldn't be opposed to some gentle auto-nudging asking users to do so if they mention SwiftUI/UIKit and they're able, but there are plenty of experienced Swift developers on this forum who can much more easily reduce a problem to the 'core' Swift issue (if any) than can a developer who is new to the language.

[Hacksaw]

So, just to see, I signed up (and subsequently deleted) a new account. At no point during the process was I offered a set of guidelines or links to a FAQ. Is there a way to have something like that pop up in such a way that it's kind of unignorable?

[Hacksaw]

Apple opensourced Swift. The goal here is to get it working on other OSs and situations.

They have not opensourced SwiftUI, it's still proprietary. At times Apple has asked that SwiftUI questions here be redirected to the Apple developer forums.

[Pretty_Girl]

Just asking as I don't know. What IDE to be used in mac to only use swift? When I installed xCode, it automatically installs swiftUI.

So are you saying if we code with swift, it will work on other operating systems (windows and linux) and platforms as well?

Apple swiftui forums are a "zombiezone" which no one replies. There are no people over there, it's just a dead end. Apple forums are an epic failure by apple.

[mayoff (Rob Mayoff)]

@Pretty_Girl

Just asking, swift is made by Apple isn't it? so it's like hating your father/mother/sibling

Don’t anthropomorphize programs. It makes them sad.

More seriously…

@Pretty_Girl

if you're making apps/servers for linux, windows, use their preferred languages and stop using swift.

There is no single preferred language for making apps/servers for Linux or Windows; there are many projects for both of those systems written in C, C++, C#, Python, Ruby, Perl, JavaScript, TypeScript, Haskell, and others. And in fact people use those to write programs for macOS too. Swift supports Linux, Windows, and WASM (though not as well as it supports Apple platforms), and may be a reasonable choice if you like the language.

@Pretty_Girl

Swift is more related to swiftUI as they have same parents. I don't understand the hatred.

It’s not about hatred. It’s about focus. The Swift language and compiler are open source/free. The community can and does make significant contributions to their development, and Apple apparently wants to encourage those contributions. So it makes sense for Apple to run a public forum where the primary focus is such development. That development includes the expansion of the Swift ecosystem, which includes OS/platform support and free/open-source third-party Swift projects.

SwiftUI is not free/open-source, so the community cannot make contributions to its development. So Apple has made the policy that SwiftUI-focused questions are off-topic here.

@Pretty_Girl

Apple swiftui forums are a "zombiezone" which no one replies. There are no people over there, it's just a dead end.

That may be, and I guess it’s Apple’s policy that Apple employees only point developers there, but it’s not the only place where SwiftUI questions are on topic. You might have more luck asking on stackoverflow. As of now I’ve personally posted 247 SwiftUI answers there.

[Jean-Daniel]

@Pretty_Girl

But still most of the tutorials also are about SwiftUI, not pure swift. I even find it hard to find a youtube video of how to pop up a basic user interface (UI) using pure swift.

Because UI is not a language concept, but a Framework concept. On Apple platform, there is 3 main frameworks to create UI: AppKit, UIKit, which are usable either in Obj-C or Swift, and SwiftUI.

There is no such things as basic UI using pure Swift, as Swift does not provide UI framework.

[anon9791410]

@Pretty_Girl

And about the "stackoverflow", it's very useful, but not for a beginner, they'll just downvote you if you ask a beginner question. That place is like "Welcome to stack exchange, you have to know the correct answer before you even post your question, or else we'll down vote you without giving any reason"

Don't worry. You are not being persecuted for being a beginner. Stack Overflow is just where developers go to get roasted with downvotes! Hardly anyone gets reputation from their question being upvoted. Only after there are a bunch of upvotes from a high-rep answerer do people start upvoting a question.

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Personally, I find it ridiculous that these forums are not permitted to provide support for the #1 use case for the Swift language, especially given that other third party software is allowed that privilege. Aside from Stack Overflow being useful for solving a small subset of problems, all the alternatives are bad. People actually use these forums, and many of those people are knowledgeable—your average knowledgeable Swift user is going to be knowledgeable about SwiftUI at this point. It's misguided and possibly sadistic gatekeeping, and ultimately, keeping the language down.

[Karl]

"just because they hate rich people? "? "ridiculous ... sadistic gatekeeping"?

The tone here is shocking. In fact, I am disgusted by it.

[andrekandore (アンドレカンドレ)]

@Jean-Daniel

Because UI is not a language concept, but a Framework concept. On Apple platform, there is 3 main frameworks to create UI

true, but this is probably confusing for newbies i would argue... why not have a link to apple swiftui under the "related projects" area like kitura and tca etc? let people come here and just redirect to apple for docs? or maybe that would just encourage more unwanted swiftui posts?

[itaiferber]

.......

I'm going to hazard a guess that if discussion of SwiftUI is considered off-topic for a Swift-language focused forum, social/philosophical/political commentary is also likely going to be off-topic, and out of place tonally and content-wise.

[Hacksaw]

This is a really important concept: Swift is a programming language, like C, C++, Obj-C, Rust, Zig, etc. It's a thing one can use to make programs and libraries. It is platform agnostic.

SwiftUI is a framework, that is, a collection of libraries, used to make GUI programs for Apple products. On Linux, you might use Swift and GTK to make a GUI program.

This difference, language versus library, is just like the human speech use of those words, libraries contains collections of "writings" in languages. And sometimes pictures.

Apples decision to call their collection of libraries SwiftUI is a bit unfortunate for clarity, though it does communicate the idea that it's a UI framework for use with Swift.

[Hacksaw]

I had the impression that Apple was trying to get people to use the dev forums with that particular request. Dunno quite how it is these days, since I mostly get answers from the wider internet, but for a long time one's only hope there was if Quinn saw your post and had time to answer it. It clearly needed help. And their revamp of it was not awe inspiring.

That the dev forums have 2316 posts related to SwiftUI versus StackOverflow with 33,000+ seems like a measure of their success in this mission, and not a good one.

[John_McCall]

Okay, no, we’re not having this here.