Science is about revealing objective truth, for example the orbit of Earth around the Sun or the ultimate interchangeability of matter and energy. Kurt Krebsbach has argued that “computer science”, despite having the word “science” in its name, is not a science. If Krebsbach is right, what is software development, which I define, for the purposes of this post, as the practical application of computer science? I view software development as a form of creative expression, often fun, that sometimes has the side-effect of creating a useful artifact, a piece of software. This post posits that norms and style are important in software development, as in English-prose composition, another form of creative expression.

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I recently modified one of my apps, Conjugar, to use SwiftUI rather than UIKit for its settings screen. I hereby present, for the reader’s edification and enjoyment, some observations and learnings from this process. I cover:

• Spurious reasons not to learn SwiftUI
• How to learn
• Naming
• Dependency injection in a mixed UIKit/SwiftUI app
• Stack Overflow filling a gap
• Animation
• Unit-testing SwiftUI

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A significant portion of my workday consists of browsing and grokking code that other people have written. I have had the experience of being frustrated, upon encountering a trailing closure, not knowing the name or therefore purpose of the argument being passed. This frustration initially caused me to consider forswearing trailing closures in my side projects. But with the benefit of contemplation and research, I have concluded that trailing closures are sometimes useful. This post describes how I reached this conclusion, recounts the history of trailing closures, and describes an analog from Kotlin.

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