Discoverability. Most people are going to try out "String".length first because that's what most other languages have. Whilst typing, if their IDE supports auto

Discoverability. Most people are going to try out "String".length first because that's what most other languages have. Whilst typing, if their IDE supports autocomplete, they'll see that 3 types of "String".length are available. Most people are not going to read through the entire list of methods of String and thereby discover .characters, .utf8, and .unicodeScalars when they want the character count of a string. I acknowledge that it may not be difficult to find this information with a quick Google search, but the more that can be done without having to switch to the browser or docs to look something up, the better. Injecting these so that they appear more frequently on the most likely UX path is better.