Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Swift Dilemma

owensd.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 129 posts

Re: My Swift Dilemma

#22

Post by crazychrome »

when I first saw Golang, I hated it, but now I think it's the best server side language. Galang is an insanely pragmatic language. It's not fancy, just works.

Facing Swift, I had mixed feelings. It's a beautiful language, probably as pretty as Ruby, but what really makes it unique, or extremely productive? I can't find any.

Am I the only one agrees with the author that generics probably do more harm than good. I'd argue that generic gives programmers a fake feeling of control and easily leads programmers spending time on over design.

Re: My Swift Dilemma

#23

Post by antimagic »

bsaul wrote: post #21

My take on swift : use it once apple release a real product made with it.

Which is fair enough, but if you look at the amount of effort they are putting in to bring Swift's documentation / tooling up to speed, it seems pretty obvious that Apple themselves have high ambitions for the language.

Also, it's going to be hard to tell how much Swift code is being shipped by Apple - the interfacing with existing Obj-C code is sufficiently clean that it's relatively simple to have parts of a product implemented in Obj-C and other parts done in Swift, and we, sitting on the outside, may never know.

Re: My Swift Dilemma

#24

Post by solarexplorer »

mpweiher wrote: post #19
PieSquared wrote: post #5

As he predicted, I was with him until his rant about generics. While the example he makes support his point, that's nothing specific to generics but instead to the implementation of generics. For example, he uses the following example as "bad" generics: func reverse (source: C) -> [C.Generator.Element] and the following example as "good" non-generics: func reverse(source: CollectionType) -> CollectionType However, yo…

>> Because it does not actually matter. If an Int gets in my array, it’s because I screwed up and likely had very poor testing around the scenario to begin with. >The benefits of static typing is that you don't need testing of things like that. The compiler guarantees safety, allowing you to avoid writing test case that are mundane and boring, such as checking that you don't put an Int into a String array. This is a…

Well, types are essentially sets of values. So if you can capture the values that you expect in a type, then the type system _does_ give you a guarantee.

Re: My Swift Dilemma

#25

Post by dirtyaura »

interpol_p wrote: post #9

The author's comment on the first example is: > what is the type of $0 and $1? Surely a great thing about Swift is that the compiler knows the types of $0 and $1 and will prevent you from doing stupid things with them like you can in Obj-C?

Yes, and having lambdas and unnamed parameters is a great thing when the local context is enough to explain it.

People are totally okay working with unnamed numbers and values, and it is as important with functions when you program in functional way.

We write

  x2 = x1 + 10
if it makes sense in the context. When it needs a better explanation we name the value

  width = 10
  ...
  x2 = x1 + width
If we would need to name EVERY number, the code would be less readable. Same with the functions, sometimes lambda with unnamed parameters (e.g. $0 < $1) is more readable than naming the lambda and all the parameters. Each name adds a conceptual burden.

Re: My Swift Dilemma

#26

Post by lerno »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #6
coldtea wrote: post #3

I'm not sure I understand the point of his post. In all the examples he gives Swift comes with better and more succint syntax plus more safety than Obj-C, and on par with his "Obj-C 3.0" idea. And of course it has tons of other features and flexibility he doesn't delve into. The whole post for me boils down to his "I hate Generics" rant at the end.

This is just a side-effect of the blub paradox disease. One of the symptoms for those that are afflicted with it is ranty blog posts about new languages that the afflicted person does not perceive as being better because it doesn't really have the same semantics as the one language they are used to. I think it was Douglas Crockford that said this. We don't get new and better technology because the old people accept i…

If you had followed what Owens has written and done in Swift, you know that he has worked and pondered the language quite a bit. Dismissing it as due to "blub" is disingenuous.

Aside from brushing away the value of his opinions, such a statement also implies that Swift is in some way sufficiently removed from mainstream languages as to feel "foreign". That is not true. Swift is a pragmatic amalgam of features from many modern languages.

The issue here is that many of the ideas are not fully realized and stunted to work within the constraints for the language (such as seamless C/ObjC interop). This is what is causing generics to only be halfway there (and same with several other features). In generics, Swift aims for strictly typed, reified generics, but then leaves you only with very crude tools to create them with. Generics in Swift is an exercise in frustration. Owens' feelings for generics might have changed if the support had been more complete.

Re: My Swift Dilemma

#27

Post by spion » 

  toUpper array := map (x => uppercase x) array
Why not just `map uppercase array` ? That way you don't even really need to define a function `toUpper array`. Isn't it customary not to mix lifting and program logic in functional programming languages?

Filter example:

  notPrefixedWithA name := not contains (prefix name) ["a", "A"]
then use

  filter notPrefixedWithA names

Re: My Swift Dilemma

#28

Post by mpweiher »

solarexplorer wrote: post #24
mpweiher wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Because it does not actually matter. If an Int gets in my array, it’s because I screwed up and likely had very poor testing around the scenario to begin with. >The benefits of static typing is that you don't need testing of things like that. The compiler guarantees safety, allowing you to avoid writing test case that are mundane and boring, such as checking that you don't put an Int into a String array. This is a…

Well, types are essentially sets of values. So if you can capture the values that you expect in a type, then the type system _does_ give you a guarantee.

But tests test for specific values. Example:

    testThatAddWorks
        result = add( 3, 4 )
        EXPECT( result , 7)

Re: My Swift Dilemma

#29

Post by orbifold »

crazychrome wrote: post #22

when I first saw Golang, I hated it, but now I think it's the best server side language. Galang is an insanely pragmatic language. It's not fancy, just works. Facing Swift, I had mixed feelings. It's a beautiful language, probably as pretty as Ruby, but what really makes it unique, or extremely productive? I can't find any. Am I the only one agrees with the author that generics probably do more harm than good. I'd ar…

What will make it unique is its painless support of Apple libraries and platforms.

Re: My Swift Dilemma

#30

Post by archagon »

In regards to optionals, I've personaly found myself using the `property?.member = value` syntax quite a bit, which lets you avoid the nil check in many cases. I don't think a nil optional should be an "error case" as the author puts it most of the time.

Overall, I've been finding Swift to be more coherent and faster to use than Obj-C in my projects, which is nice. But I'm not a language power user.

Post reply on HN