Chris Lattner on the Realm WWDC 2017 Swift Panel
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Re: Chris Lattner on the Realm WWDC 2017 Swift Panel
#2 Wow, he just really really does not like C++. He is certainly an extremely knowledgeable C++ guy, obviously Swift is written in C++, but it's hard to entirely agree with his opinion on it across all fronts.
Re: Chris Lattner on the Realm WWDC 2017 Swift Panel
#3> My goal for Swift has always been and still is total world domination
I hope that this is never happen. Swift is great, it's universal and it saves you a lot of time during coding, BUT It also has very large syntax and high number of features - documentation is huge! The most of swift programmers probably don't know complete syntax and all features which is problem in a world where we code in teams and work with open source(both cases mean that you work with code you didn't write).
We just need new simple way how billions of people can explain computers what to do and backwards understand what computer was told to do and I'm sure that it's not Swift, Java or C++.
Re: Chris Lattner on the Realm WWDC 2017 Swift Panel
#4Wow, he just really really does not like C++. He is certainly an extremely knowledgeable C++ guy, obviously Swift is written in C++, but it's hard to entirely agree with his opinion on it across all fronts.
As someone who spent over 20 years writing applications in C, anything built on C is crap and that includes C++ and Objective C.
Writing code is fun and interesting. But most software development is not writing code. It's a little bit of build management, even more testing, but mostly it's debugging. Debugging is not as fun as writing code. Every language feature that makes debugging more necessary, harder to do and more time intensive sucks. Dangling pointers are the absolute worst.
I can easily give up multiple inheritance for a more functional language that's far easier to write correct code in.
Re: Chris Lattner on the Realm WWDC 2017 Swift Panel
#5> My goal for Swift has always been and still is total world domination I hope that this is never happen. Swift is great, it's universal and it saves you a lot of time during coding, BUT It also has very large syntax and high number of features - documentation is huge! The most of swift programmers probably don't know complete syntax and all features which is problem in a world where we code in teams and work with op…
That feature size is why Swift is so scalable. Writing useful programs is easy to do for beginners with a very limited subset of the language. But as you expand your knowledge Swift is rich with features that make complex apps much easier to write for professionals.
Re: Chris Lattner on the Realm WWDC 2017 Swift Panel
#6BTW: Before we get too deep in specific language criticisms, let's not forget that Chris Lattner is awesome. The fact that two super smart guys with huge work ethics like Chris and Elon Musk couldn't get along is very disappointing to me.
Re: Chris Lattner on the Realm WWDC 2017 Swift Panel
#7Interesting interview. Java is mentioned many times as language Swift aspires to replace. He is right about Kotlin:
"Kotlin is very reference semantics, itʼs a thin layer on top of Java, and so it perpetuates through a lot of the Javaisms in its model.
If we had done an analog to that for Objective-C it would be like, everything is an NSObject and itʼs objc_msgSend everywhere, just with parentheses instead of square brackets. .."
I think Swift has real chance to reach Java level popularity. It is already at #11 in Redmonk ranking. All languages above Swift are at least 15 year older than Swift. And once it server side features like concurrency it can be much more general purpose.
Re: Chris Lattner on the Realm WWDC 2017 Swift Panel
#8> My goal for Swift has always been and still is total world domination I hope that this is never happen. Swift is great, it's universal and it saves you a lot of time during coding, BUT It also has very large syntax and high number of features - documentation is huge! The most of swift programmers probably don't know complete syntax and all features which is problem in a world where we code in teams and work with op…
That feature size is why Swift is so scalable. Writing useful programs is easy to do for beginners with a very limited subset of the language. But as you expand your knowledge Swift is rich with features that make complex apps much easier to write for professionals.
I don't think the problem with a large syntax is for writing - it's for reading. What happens when those same beginners are thrust into a professional production codebase and struggle to figure out what's going on?
It's interesting to note that Google has taken the deliberately opposite approach with Go: small syntax, learn 90% of the language's ins-and-outs in a few weeks, so that the average fresh college grad Googler (average tenure being less than 2 years, IIRC) spends as little time as possible ramping up and has relatively predictable output.
Re: Chris Lattner on the Realm WWDC 2017 Swift Panel
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
That feature size is why Swift is so scalable. Writing useful programs is easy to do for beginners with a very limited subset of the language. But as you expand your knowledge Swift is rich with features that make complex apps much easier to write for professionals.
I don't think the problem with a large syntax is for writing - it's for reading . What happens when those same beginners are thrust into a professional production codebase and struggle to figure out what's going on? It's interesting to note that Google has taken the deliberately opposite approach with Go: small syntax, learn 90% of the language's ins-and-outs in a few weeks, so that the average fresh college grad Goo…
There is some truth to what you are saying. I'm not a beginner so I probably can't appreciate how hard it is to learn new syntactical features. My experience is I've found it pretty easy to learn new ones from my peer's code, but I struggle with actually forcing myself to teach myself new and more complex language features when the existing ones work so well for me.
I'd say Swift is probably harder to learn than it could be because of how much syntax for common features has changed over major releases.
Re: Chris Lattner on the Realm WWDC 2017 Swift Panel
#10> What irritates me is when people say classes are bad. Or subclassing is bad. Thatʼs totally false. Classes are super important. Reference semantics are super important. If anything, the thing thatʼs wrong is to say, one thing is bad and the other thing is good. These are all different tools in our toolbox, and theyʼre used to solve different kinds of problems.
Couldn't agree more