This obsession with “unifying” disparate things under One True API / UI / Language is all over software. It’s probably the same mentality behind what what Microsoft was doing with Windows 8 and Metro. Unnecessary abstraction is the bad Software Engineer’s bread and butter. We’ve all worked with That Guy who kept arguing “We could call X and Y the same way if we just had a unifying abstraction Z. It would simplify everything!” Z becomes the worst of both X and Y and the customer is less satisfied just wants to keep X and Y separate. But the developer is more comfortable now, and that’s what matters.

Everything seems to get sacrificed at the altar of Developer Comfort. Performance gets thrown under the bus so we can write everything in JavaScript. Platform-specific features get abandoned or neutered in a cross-platform framework so we only have to target one API. We ship gigs of Docker containers so we don’t have to get our software to work on all the customers’ computers.

This is just another example. Wouldn’t it be great if iOS apps and Mac applications converged on the same thing? Only a developer would want this.