Chris Lattner

I think this is one of the lessons I learned from Swift also, by the way, is that when we launched Swift, gosh, it feels like forever ago.

It was 2014.

And we, I mean, it was super exciting.

I and we, the team, had worked on Swift for a number of years in secrecy, okay?

And we, four years into this development, roughly, of working on this thing, at that point, about 250 people at Apple knew about it.

Okay, so it was secret.

Apple's good at secrecy, and it was a secret project.

And so we launched this at WWDC, a bunch of hoopla and excitement, and said, developers, you're going to be able to develop and submit apps to the App Store in three months.

Okay.

Well, several interesting things happened, right?

So first of all, we learned that, A, it had a lot of bugs.

And it was not actually production quality.

And it was extremely stressful in terms of like trying to get it working for a bunch of people.

And so what happened was we went from zero to, you know, I don't know how many developers Apple had at the time, but a lot of developers overnight.

And they ran into a lot of bugs and it was really embarrassing and it was very stressful for everybody involved, right?

It was also very exciting because everybody was excited about that.

The other thing I learned is that when that happened, roughly every software engineer who did not know about the project at Apple

their head exploded when it was launched because they didn't know it was coming.

And so they're like, wait, what is this?

I signed up to work for Apple because I love objective C. Why is there a new thing?