Swift Programming Language Evolution
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Swift Programming Language Evolution
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Re: Swift Programming Language Evolution
#2So Swift has been out awhile, what do people think of it? What other language would you compare it to (e.g. C#, C, C++, etc)? What about the libraries are they well laid out?
Re: Swift Programming Language Evolution
#3Are there any plans in place for locking down the syntax? Major release 3 is coming and developers are still being expected to hit a moving target.
One of the nice things about C is that K&R era C is just as valid as C written nowadays, but Swift appears to be going in the opposite direction, every major release adding and removing bits of syntax.
As someone unfamiliar with the language, it makes me not want to pick it up, since guides and documentation I read now will be incompatible with the newer release when it happens. Some early toying around during Swift's original announcement led to hard-to-debug errors (in part, caused by terribly useless error messages) when trying identical code on newer releases.
Re: Swift Programming Language Evolution
#4So Swift has been out awhile, what do people think of it? What other language would you compare it to (e.g. C#, C, C++, etc)? What about the libraries are they well laid out?
I've been playing around with it a little and it's... fine? Very capable. Not run into any moments that have blown my mind, but neither have I found any that disgusted me.
In a weird way it actually reminds me most of TypeScript - JavaScript-y, but with types and stronger enforcement of rules.
Re: Swift Programming Language Evolution
#5Are there any plans in place for locking down the syntax? Major release 3 is coming and developers are still being expected to hit a moving target. One of the nice things about C is that K&R era C is just as valid as C written nowadays, but Swift appears to be going in the opposite direction, every major release adding and removing bits of syntax. As someone unfamiliar with the language, it makes me not want to pick…
Certainly a problem they're aware of, and they're trying to get as many breaking changes done in 3.0 as possible. There may or may not be more in 4.0, but they will definitely be smaller.
> What does this mean looking forward? Well, Swift 2 to Swift 3 is going to be an unavoidably disruptive change for code since Cocoa renamification is going to land, and we’re going to be building impressive migration technology again. As such, we should try to get the “rearrange all the deckchairs” changes into Swift 3 if possible, to make Swift 3 to 4 as smooth as possible. While our community has generally been very kind and understanding about Swift evolving under their feet, we cannot keep doing this for long. While I don’t think we’ll want to guarantee 100% source compatibility from Swift 3 to Swift 4, I’m hopefully that it will be much simpler than the upgrade to Swift 2 was or Swift 3 will be.
http://ericasadun.com/2016/02/29/getting-ready-for-swift-to-...
Re: Swift Programming Language Evolution
#6So Swift has been out awhile, what do people think of it? What other language would you compare it to (e.g. C#, C, C++, etc)? What about the libraries are they well laid out?
I'm a big fan. I love the statically inferred type system, generics, & optionals. Also really like a lot of the functional programming concepts + value types but still enjoy being able to fall back on OOP. It feels like the best of both worlds. I can't wait till we have language native concurrency techniques, so I can start writing swift in backend code.
Re: Swift Programming Language Evolution
#7So Swift has been out awhile, what do people think of it? What other language would you compare it to (e.g. C#, C, C++, etc)? What about the libraries are they well laid out?
I made an app with Swift (my only iOS app). I like it. I like clean, easy-to-read languages where I can get stuff done quickly and reading code isn't a huge pain and using a new library isn't a huge pain. Swift seems to fit those preferences so far.
The debug messages were confusing. I never used Obj-C so I'm not sure if that's iOS or Swift that causes confusing error messages.
Re: Swift Programming Language Evolution
#8So Swift has been out awhile, what do people think of it? What other language would you compare it to (e.g. C#, C, C++, etc)? What about the libraries are they well laid out?
My favorite thing about Swift is that is seems to get out of the way - and when it gets in the way it's usually with a nifty language feature (like the { $0 + $1 } closure syntax). I'm very excited for the future - between Go and Swift we now have two compiled fast languages that are almost as expressive as their slower dynamic/interpreted cousins.
As an aside, I like that Apple is betting the farm on ARC. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when they were discussing ARC versus GC.
Re: Swift Programming Language Evolution
#9So Swift has been out awhile, what do people think of it? What other language would you compare it to (e.g. C#, C, C++, etc)? What about the libraries are they well laid out?
My favorite thing about Swift is that is seems to get out of the way - and when it gets in the way it's usually with a nifty language feature (like the { $0 + $1 } closure syntax). I'm very excited for the future - between Go and Swift we now have two compiled fast languages that are almost as expressive as their slower dynamic/interpreted cousins. As an aside, I like that Apple is betting the farm on ARC. I wish I c…
I think they had to go with ARC due to the requirement that swift interoperates with Objective-C. If that hadn't been a constraint, yeah it would be an interesting decision.
Re: Swift Programming Language Evolution
#10Are there any plans in place for locking down the syntax? Major release 3 is coming and developers are still being expected to hit a moving target. One of the nice things about C is that K&R era C is just as valid as C written nowadays, but Swift appears to be going in the opposite direction, every major release adding and removing bits of syntax. As someone unfamiliar with the language, it makes me not want to pick…
I believe Swift 3.0 is the last breaking release. Version after this will avoid breaking the API and language as much as possible, and I imagine allow backwards compatibility for changes they do make.
I'm okay with the fast-moving nature of Swift. It's a very young language that obviously needed a lot of changes, and if they had to take the time to make the earliest features available all the way in version 3, Swift would already be bloated. But they have been able to do away with backwards compatibility which is difficult in the industry, and I think it allowed them to make a richer language, not held back by anything.
Side note: For at least some of the changes they've made, they've also built into the compiler and Xcode smart error messages that see the old syntax, and allow you to click one button to fix it to the latest syntax. Such as the old `for i in 0..10 {}` to the new `for i in 0..<10 {}`, Xcode will tell you to basically insert the `<` for the new operator.