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My Swift Dilemma

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Re: My Swift Dilemma

#61

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…

Golang is an evolutionary dead end. It missed out on the last 25 years of language research.

I'm following Rust more closely because it has new ideas for systems programming. Go has no new ideas.

Re: My Swift Dilemma

#62
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Not that I'm doubting you. Could you please provide me a link so that i can educate myself?

Unfortunately it's not a written statement ( you can imagine that nobody working at apple would publicly say a thing like that). And it's not a direct source either, so you can very well take that with a grain of salt. Actually, I am still hoping that someone will contradict me by providing concrete example of apple software using core data though, because as i stated, i invested a lot in that technology for an impor…

Well, the Notes app on Mavericks uses Core Data. I know it's a trivial example but it's the first one I found.

(~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Notes/NotesV2.storedata is a Core Data SQLite store.)

Re: My Swift Dilemma

#63
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…

> I think it was Douglas Crockford that said this. We don't get new and better technology because the old people accept it. We get new and better technology because the people using the old crap just die out.

A bit ironic considering what a stick-in-the-mud he is.

Re: My Swift Dilemma

#66
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…

Post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8367012 suggests that it is actually Swift that is the Blub language...

Re: My Swift Dilemma

#68
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently learned that core data wasn't used internally at apple. That freaked me out, because it made me feel that choosing that technology for a serious project was a mistake, despite the numerous documentation and support apple provides for it.

Really? Not that I'm doubting you. Could you please provide me a link so that i can educate myself?

I can tell you that many projects have used CoreData, and abandoned it in short order.

Largely because it is a complex beast that many don't bother to become familiar with before they use it. Perhaps that is damning enough.

Lots of SQLite and PLISTS prevail, perhaps indicating the domain of data that needs to be stored for your average application.

Re: My Swift Dilemma

#69
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But tests test for specific values. Example: testThatAddWorks result = add( 3, 4 ) EXPECT( result , 7)

I know that's just an example and that you probably don't actually write tests like that in your day job, but it's a terrible unit test. For example, it fails to tell apart addition from the constant function 7. Even if you add more data points, you're still not testing addition. In a way, "testing for specific values" is very misleading. Consider that it'd be the wrong if you were actually trying to prove something.…

> For example, it fails to tell apart addition from the constant function 7.

Right. But how would you test for the addition function without exhaustive O(N^2) search over the whole input space? (You need to test for commutativity; if you're going to test for associativity, it grows to O(N^3)).

Re: My Swift Dilemma

#70
post #49
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those values have types, so those get tested as a side effect without any additional effort. Not in the presence of implicit conversions, often insane in dynamic languages. (like, 12 + "34a" gives 46).

Often? what language does '12 + "34a" gives 46'? Not even perl does that.

> Not even perl does that.

Are you sure?

    perl -e 'print "12" + "34a","\n"'
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