[swift-users] Swift and Xcode along with Playgrounds is full of bugs

[Jens Alfke]

> On Nov 1, 2016, at 9:50 PM, Shyamal Chandra via swift-users <swift-users at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> Why don't you make the Playgrounds open source so I can investigate? 

I’ve been hearing people tell Apple “why don’t you make ___ open source” for as long as the term ‘open source’ has existed. Sometimes it happens, but the decision doesn’t seem to be based on factors like ‘people on the Internet are yelling at us to open-source this’, or ‘this feature sucks, let’s dump the source code on Github and let volunteers fix it for us for free!’

I’m being sarcastic here, but if you’d ever run an open source project — or worse, open-sourced an existing code base — you’d have some idea of the complexity of what you’re asking. Open source is a commitment, and it can be a ton of work just getting the code ready, especially when it has dependencies on private APIs from other components that shouldn’t be exposed. Even comments and identifiers need to be scrubbed of references to internal/secret/embarrassing information, like “// we’re commenting out this feature until the 2017 Mac Pro ships in March”, or “// Workaround to make Photoshop compile, no thanks to those morons at Adobe”. (Yes, I went through stuff like this in one project in the ‘90s.)

As for Playgrounds, I’m not aware of Apple open-sourcing GUI-level application code. Ever. (Someone correct me if I’ve forgotten something.)

> You should tell this to Tim Cook as soon as possible.

Because everyone at Apple is on a first-name basis with Tim Cook and feels free to drop into his office and tell him what to do. 🙄 Back when I worked at Apple I used to drop in on Steve and tell him the metal UI appearance sucked. He’d chuckle in his kindly way, and then nail my head to the floor.

—Jens
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