Debug 32: John Siracusa on Copland 2014

By Rene Ritchie
last updated

John Siracusa of Hypercritical and the Accidental Tech Podcast shows up to fight with Guy over Copland 2014. That is, the idea that Apple needs to embrace elements of higher level languages and figure out what comes after Objective C.

Show notes

Guests

Hosts

Feedback

Yell at us on Twitter or leave a comment below.

Rene Ritchie
Rene Ritchie
Contributor

Rene Ritchie is one of the most respected Apple analysts in the business, reaching a combined audience of over 40 million readers a month. His YouTube channel, Vector, has over 90 thousand subscribers and 14 million views and his podcasts, including Debug, have been downloaded over 20 million times. He also regularly co-hosts MacBreak Weekly for the TWiT network and co-hosted CES Live! and Talk Mobile. Based in Montreal, Rene is a former director of product marketing, web developer, and graphic designer. He's authored several books and appeared on numerous television and radio segments to discuss Apple and the technology industry. When not working, he likes to cook, grapple, and spend time with his friends and family.

12 Comments
  • John's not a fighter; he's a thinker.
  • Guy, you were really bad on this podcast. Worse than usual. Were you drunk? You sounded drunk.
  • What a waste of time. What's the point of getting Siracusa to interview, then talking over him most of the time? Terrible interviewer, added nothing, rude, seems like he wanted to argue rather than contribute. Painful.
  • They've been friends for 15 years, that's exactly how they sound at conferences in person. :)
  • Err, fine, I too have good friends like that, it didn't add much to topic is the point. Think john was pissed about it, but was being polite.
  • With all respect I can only agree with the critical comments. Not the best Debug despite the excellent guest. And if that is just the way Guy speaks then he was doing it more than usual.
  • I thought it was good! They were just nudging eachother back and forth. Ultimately, I think both of them came to an agreement that even if there is no HUGE pressing need to transplant objective-c, something needs to be done to make objective-c easier to handle with a more higher-level language in the long run. BTW, that's just Guy's regular sounding voice... it's not that he's drunk. Sent from the iMore App
  • The guy interviewing sounded like he was stoned. Long pauses, stuttering, unmotivated rants and laughs, man, it was horrible to listen. You should mever let this individual host a podcast again.
  • It almost sounds like Siracusa is arguing for an Android-like approach: use a register-based virtual machine with garbage collection that supports multiple languages (Dalvik), but also have a way for legacy and performance-critical code to run (the NDK). Android's Renderscript module is a nice middle-ground - it uses LLVM IR (bytecode) for distribution (to remain platform independent) but is compiled to native code at runtime. And it can distribute tasks between CPUs and GPUs. I think an approach like the Java Virtual Machine or .NET Common Language Runtime is critical because it gives you a way to experiment with new languages while retaining compatibility with existing code bases. For example, the Scala language for the JVM is becoming increasingly popular, but it wouldn't have its marketshare without the ability to import existing Java libraries.
  • Agreed. I listen to Debug and enjoy the interviewees, but don't necessarily enjoy Guy aggrandising himself constantly. It's the first time I've listened to Siracusa and come away without picking up an interesting idea or perspective. Not Guy English's finest hour.
  • Interesting discussion. I would ask that Guy please stop using profanity. I teach some teenagers about software and I point them to interesting interviews. I won't point them to this because of the profanity. I also guy you need to clear your throat or something. Its hard to listen to you most of the time.
  • ... and now we have Apple Swift! Looks like Swift is really fulfilling many of the deficiencies. For me looks a lot what is behind the Rust language. What I can't see in Swift (when comparing to Rust) are:
    1. concurrency. - which is understandable primarily having iOS in mind bur for larger scale server apps a clear MUST!
    2. a macro system. For sure it is (and was) debatable but when we look what can be done in Rust or DrRacket then I believe a modern macro system should still be part of every state in class modern language. ... now I am waiting for a next debug podcast picking up this dialog!
    ... and it is time that one of these modern languages takes over the dominant role from Java/C++!