I'm not sure Cocoa's dev experience is a plus right now though - isn't Marzipan intended to fix that?
I mean, you were on the AppKit team, so I don't think I need to list out the oddities/issues/etc it's currently got. Just curious if the general attitude in Apple was akin to "it's fine", or "we know it needs work, but we'll get there eventually".
Mac Cocoa dev has been evolving slowly and incrementally due to the small team size and strong backwards compatibility culture. It's fallen behind as a result. But fundamentally a platform-specific API and toolset can move much faster than a standards-limited web API.
That said it's easy to overextend yourself, as Microsoft demonstrated with their API treadmill. The art of engineering is to set the right evolutionary pace.
Your question is very good, and above my pay grade. In 2013 I had lots of opinions about how ObjC was evolving too slowly, and I was floored the next year when Swift (a well-kept secret within Apple) was unveiled. Apple is full of surprises, even to its own employees.
I don't disagree re: the pace, but I think it's important to note that when it's really just Electron (Chrome) that people are shoving everywhere, it's not _really_ a standards-limited web API... it's whatever Google opts to give them. Electron is sadly the first really approachable "build your app in a virtual machine and it'll just work" approach.
Anyway, not looking to derail the discussion, just wanted to say thanks for commenting - wasn't sure if anyone ex-Apple would be comfortable doing so.
I mean, you were on the AppKit team, so I don't think I need to list out the oddities/issues/etc it's currently got. Just curious if the general attitude in Apple was akin to "it's fine", or "we know it needs work, but we'll get there eventually".