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Swift Regrets

belkadan.com

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Re: Swift Regrets

#2
Swift has way too many shorthand syntaxes. It feels nice from a language design perspective but when teaching Swift, you can see how confusing it is for the students. In larger codebases a lot of shorthands are forbidden by the organizations for consistency. So I'm not sure who's the real beneficiary for all those shorthands?

Re: Swift Regrets

#3
post #2

Swift has way too many shorthand syntaxes. It feels nice from a language design perspective but when teaching Swift, you can see how confusing it is for the students. In larger codebases a lot of shorthands are forbidden by the organizations for consistency. So I'm not sure who's the real beneficiary for all those shorthands?

i think there's a growing concern about the language complexity. I hope next releases are going to be about trimming down the language, and consolidating the not-so-sexy but very important other aspects (multiplatform, compilation speed, spm, tooling, etc) following golang's example.

Re: Swift Regrets

#4
I don’t know if this is Swift’s fault, per se but I find Xcode to be a real pain to use. There’s something about the Apple Way for UI/UX that just doesn’t jive well with an IDE experience. I find myself constantly jockeying around the various windows and panes within Xcode that I usually never have to bother with inside of Visual Studio.

Re: Swift Regrets

#5
post #3
post #2

Swift has way too many shorthand syntaxes. It feels nice from a language design perspective but when teaching Swift, you can see how confusing it is for the students. In larger codebases a lot of shorthands are forbidden by the organizations for consistency. So I'm not sure who's the real beneficiary for all those shorthands?

i think there's a growing concern about the language complexity. I hope next releases are going to be about trimming down the language, and consolidating the not-so-sexy but very important other aspects (multiplatform, compilation speed, spm, tooling, etc) following golang's example.

[deleted]

Re: Swift Regrets

#6

I don’t know if this is Swift’s fault, per se but I find Xcode to be a real pain to use. There’s something about the Apple Way for UI/UX that just doesn’t jive well with an IDE experience. I find myself constantly jockeying around the various windows and panes within Xcode that I usually never have to bother with inside of Visual Studio.

Xcode's faults preceded Swift by many years.

Re: Swift Regrets

#7
Before Swift/Kotlin our iOS team was way more productive than android. Everything was done in half the time.

They both switched to new languages.

Now it has flipped. Android does things in half the time the other team needs.

Re: Swift Regrets

#8

I don’t know if this is Swift’s fault, per se but I find Xcode to be a real pain to use. There’s something about the Apple Way for UI/UX that just doesn’t jive well with an IDE experience. I find myself constantly jockeying around the various windows and panes within Xcode that I usually never have to bother with inside of Visual Studio.

There is swift language tooling for vscode, if you’re so inclined.

Re: Swift Regrets

#9
post #7

Before Swift/Kotlin our iOS team was way more productive than android. Everything was done in half the time. They both switched to new languages. Now it has flipped. Android does things in half the time the other team needs.

That's just your team then. Swift is far superior to Objective-C(rap) in terms of both speed and overall productivity.

Re: Swift Regrets

#10
I guess I was in the minority who loved Objective-C and it's selector syntax. I think my main objection to Swift is that it seems to be written by people who hate Objective-C and made the calling syntax much more complicated. I dearly wish a more mature F-Script had been the next Apple language.

A lot of the other problems is Apple not providing good documentation and making sure sample programs continue to compile. Bringing a new language into the world requires massive amounts of high quality documentation.

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