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Swift Regrets

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Re: Swift Regrets

#11

Post by zionic »

protomyth wrote: post #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.…

> I think my main objection to Swift is that it seems to be written by people who hate Objective-C

I mean that's the vast majority of people

>and made the calling syntax much more complicated.

How is this true? Swift is very straightforward, and similar to other languages

Meanwhile Objective-C is slow, unsafe by default, with super ugly syntax only a mother could love. More than half of Apple's CVE/iOS vulnerabilities lately have been from parts of the OS that still use ObjC, the sooner they get rid of that garbage the better.

Re: Swift Regrets

#12

Post by kennywinker »

rapsey wrote: 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.

I find it hard to believe that anybody is faster coding in objc than swift, if you control for garbage code. It was easy to quickly write buggy messes in objc - swift made that a lot harder, and is also a much more ergonomic and productive language in my experience. I feel like there has to be some other factors at play if that’s the results you’re seeing. (Source: I’ve been doing objc since 2009, and swift since version 1.0)

Re: Swift Regrets

#13

Post by adamnemecek »

protomyth wrote: post #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.…

I think that apple hated that at the end of the day, a lot of the system frameworks had to be written in objective-c++ which is not great.

Re: Swift Regrets

#14

Post by jorgemf »

zionic wrote: post #9
rapsey wrote: 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.

Don't forget kotlin. It is a really game changer.

Re: Swift Regrets

#15

Post by diskzero »

msoad wrote: 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?

The shorthands mystify me as well. I have taught a few courses using Swift and the shorthand notation, as well as implicit variables like oldValue and newValue in setters, are confusing. You can try to ignore them, but eventually a student will find them.

In my experience, teaching courses using Racket have had better outcomes. At the end of the Racket courses, I can quickly transition students to other languages, including Swift. It hasn't worked out so well with Swift. I am still gathering data so I can come to a better conclusion as to why.

Re: Swift Regrets

#16

Post by throwdecro »

msoad wrote: 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?

> Swift has way too man shorthand syntaxes. It feels nice from a language design perspective but when teaching Swift, you can see how confusing it is for the students.

100% agree. As a late adopter of Swift, I spent a lot of time looking at code that was so stingy with information that it was challenging to even formulate a Google-able question from it.

Re: Swift Regrets

#17

Post by ardit33 »

kennywinker wrote: post #12
rapsey wrote: 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.

I find it hard to believe that anybody is faster coding in objc than swift, if you control for garbage code. It was easy to quickly write buggy messes in objc - swift made that a lot harder, and is also a much more ergonomic and productive language in my experience. I feel like there has to be some other factors at play if that’s the results you’re seeing. (Source: I’ve been doing objc since 2009, and swift since ver…

A well jelled team, with senior engineers can be much more productive with Objective C.

But for beginners, swift looks less intimidating due to its syntax familiarity. The language pitfalls become apparent as you dive into it.

Perhaps that’s why swift in ML and other areas failed. People don’t like the language. In iOS you are forced to use it.

I hope the swift team does some hard thinking and start slashing features and make it Simpler. What we got is something more complex than even Java. This is the same reason that Scala didn't take off (even though some people like it).

Re: Swift Regrets

#18

Post by wlesieutre »

kennywinker wrote: post #12
rapsey wrote: 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.

I find it hard to believe that anybody is faster coding in objc than swift, if you control for garbage code. It was easy to quickly write buggy messes in objc - swift made that a lot harder, and is also a much more ergonomic and productive language in my experience. I feel like there has to be some other factors at play if that’s the results you’re seeing. (Source: I’ve been doing objc since 2009, and swift since ver…

They're not saying developing in Swift is faster than OjbC, they're saying Java for Android was slower than ObjC for iOS, and now Kotlin for Android is faster than Swift for iOS.

Both teams move faster in the new languages, but the Android team moves more faster.

Re: Swift Regrets

#19

Post by occamrazor »

kennywinker wrote: post #12
rapsey wrote: 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.

I find it hard to believe that anybody is faster coding in objc than swift, if you control for garbage code. It was easy to quickly write buggy messes in objc - swift made that a lot harder, and is also a much more ergonomic and productive language in my experience. I feel like there has to be some other factors at play if that’s the results you’re seeing. (Source: I’ve been doing objc since 2009, and swift since ver…

I think GP is saying that ObjC is faster than Java for development, but Kotlin is faster than Swift. No comparison between ObjC and Swift.

Re: Swift Regrets

#20

Post by jshier »

jorgemf wrote: post #14
zionic wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Don't forget kotlin. It is a really game changer.

Yeah, this sounds like a tooling issue. I have no difficultly believing Kotlin + Android Studio might be faster or more reliable than Swift + Xcode. Hard to say with any certainty though, it could be any number of things, if the perceived difference is even real.
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