Swift Package Index joins Apple

Earlier versions of Mac OS had an app called ‘Sherlock’[^1] that could search local files and the web in a fairly rigid manner.

‘Watson’[^2] was a third party shareware app very much inspired by Sherlock (and obviously, given the name, not trying to hide that!) that was much more flexible, more ‘OS X-like’, arguably much more user friendly, and was open to plugins (like, there was a movie time search plugin, an eBay plugin, an Amazon plugin etc).

Sherlock 3[^3], in MacOS 10.2, was redesigned with a UI very like that of Watson, and also allowed similar plugins, making Watson obsolete.

In the Apple developer world, “being Sherlocked” came to mean “your app being made obsolete by Apple including identical functionality with the OS”.

1: https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/f2d124c36d74f71c6... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)

> An hour later, Steve Jobs called me.

> "Here's how I see it," Jobs said — I'm loosely paraphrasing.

> "You know those handcars, the little machines that people stand on and pump to move along on the train tracks? That's Karelia. Apple is the steam train that owns the tracks."

> So basically the message was: get out of the way, kid; this is our market.

Hope folks will always keep that in mind as they develop software for proprietary platforms they don't own.

https://www.paulgraham.com/road.html

> If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS.

> And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.

Unlike them, Apple takes a stance of contravening the public good to emphasize lock-in. They refused USB-C for as long as possible to sell licensed serial connectors that their Macs didn't even use. They fought tooth-and-nail to politicize the free distribution of software when the EU wanted to enable sideloading. They abandoned open initiatives like Khronos, for no reason other than to screw over cross-platform developers. They give Safari special OS entitlements that they refuse to extend to competing mobile browsers, and then justify it as if they can't write a safe OS.

There is no company on planet Earth that goes this far to undermine FOSS. Apple is the fakest Scot.

But although that's enough for me to want no part of it, that's not what I was gesturing at. When we dig under the "Foundation" to look at the standard library we find that contrary to your assurance what works and how it works varies from one platform to another, just Apple only care about Apple platforms and so as usual they don't think that's worth mentioning.

They do have this information, they just don't publish it on their Apple pages because they're Apple and yet they insist this counts as the Swift documentation - and that should be all the reason you need not to take such "support" seriously.

I wasn't arguing against Swift needing a default package manager, I agree with that. Just the examples you picked to compare with are odd in context. You could compare Swift to its contemporaries like Rust or Zig and come to the same conclusion.