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Reflection sucks in swift which makes many web patterns tedious to implement.

by fleitz 11y ago

joslin01 11y ago
Ya, I was just gonna post this. Scala has more powerful generics and an eco-system of, oh I don't know, every java library ever created. It's also got the Play framework and Akka. When it comes to rationally planned web development, Swift is very low on the totem pole and a bunch of cute language features aren't gonna change that.
- falsedan 11y ago
  Swift's biggest advantage over Scala is its tight coupling with a commendable IDE. Perfect doesn't seem to address how debugging a server-side app will work with Xcode…
  - joslin01 11y ago
    I agree with you and that's a nice rebuttal. I use XCode daily since I code in Swift for an iOS project. Great tool. However, I really wouldn't trade so much away just to stay in the same IDE and I certainly wouldn't construct a plan to do so. All the people down-voting me are just Swift fanatics who probably haven't touched the language all that deep. Good language, love the replacement for Objective-C, and you could argue GCD makes Akka unnecessary (though I wouldn't go that far), but again not fit for web development in my humble opinion..
  - fleitz 11y ago
    XCode (for ObjC) is very commendable for no longer crashing every 5 minutes, other than that its pretty crappy compared to other IDEs created by multi-billion dollar companies (even some open source IDEs are better) When working in swift it's as if someone rewrote the thing in Java. As obnoxious as eclipse can be, it at least code completes in a reasonable time.
  - tychuz 11y ago
    I don't know, most people I know use XCode only for drag and drop quick UI stuff and for actual development they use AppCode (also supports Swift 2).
bjz_ 11y ago
Doesn't reflection make lots of things harder to debug and understand? Why should one need to take on the ugly patterns of other ecosystems? It also kills many of the good points of statically typed languages - ie. type safety, ease of optimization, and performance.
- joslin01 11y ago
  Calling "reflection" an ugly pattern is like calling onions a bad recipe. It's up to you how you intend to use it, but please, let's not be ridiculous and call it an "ugly pattern of other ecosystems." Reflection doesn't get in the way of type safety (in fact, it's generally supported by it) and "ease of optimization" and "performance" is just BS. Ya, sure, sometimes reflection slows things down but web devs who use ruby for 90% of projects don't care about that. I'd love to hear you try and explain how reflection tarnishes "ease of optimization" and why it's so "ugly"
  - netheril96 11y ago
    > Web devs who use ruby ... Ruby is not a statically typed language and has nothing to do with type safety or ease of optimization. Reflection for a dynamic language is hardly the same as reflection for static language.
    - joslin01 11y ago
      Good way to take a few words completely out of context. I said "web devs who use ruby for 90% of projects" as in "they obviously don't care much about performance in the first place" If you had anything you wanted to offer, I'm all ears but you telling me dynamic vs static reflection have different implementation details (and necessarily different implications) is pretty obvious, wouldn't you agree?
      - netheril96 11y ago
        I was wondering if you had more experience with Ruby than with a statically typed language like Java, and thus did not see the problem with reflection. Now, to answer your previous question, about how reflection is bad: * Reflection allows one to dynamically add, remove and modify properties and methods, and that breaks type safety. Compilers are no longer able to prove deterministically that a certain object has certain properties or certain methods, or that certain methods have certain signatures because all those may change at runtime. * That which can be dynamically changed must be dynamically resolved. And dynamic resolution is slower. * It breaks encapsulation. It exposes private APIs and allows immutable objects to be modified. That is why its usage is ugly. A dynamically typed language has much less problems with reflection, since in these languages, dynamic resolution is the norm, and they are not amenable to static analysis anyway.

Reflection sucks in swift which makes many web patterns tedious to implement.

by fleitz 11y ago

Reflection sucks in swift which makes many web patterns tedious to implement.

Ya, I was just gonna post this. Scala has more powerful generics and an eco-system of, oh I don't know, every java library ever created. It's also got the Play framework and Akka. When it comes to rationally planned web development, Swift is very low on the totem pole and a bunch of cute language features aren't gonna change that.

falsedan 11y ago
Swift's biggest advantage over Scala is its tight coupling with a commendable IDE. Perfect doesn't seem to address how debugging a server-side app will work with Xcode…
- joslin01 11y ago
  I agree with you and that's a nice rebuttal. I use XCode daily since I code in Swift for an iOS project. Great tool. However, I really wouldn't trade so much away just to stay in the same IDE and I certainly wouldn't construct a plan to do so. All the people down-voting me are just Swift fanatics who probably haven't touched the language all that deep. Good language, love the replacement for Objective-C, and you could argue GCD makes Akka unnecessary (though I wouldn't go that far), but again not fit for web development in my humble opinion..
- fleitz 11y ago
  XCode (for ObjC) is very commendable for no longer crashing every 5 minutes, other than that its pretty crappy compared to other IDEs created by multi-billion dollar companies (even some open source IDEs are better) When working in swift it's as if someone rewrote the thing in Java. As obnoxious as eclipse can be, it at least code completes in a reasonable time.
- tychuz 11y ago
  I don't know, most people I know use XCode only for drag and drop quick UI stuff and for actual development they use AppCode (also supports Swift 2).

bjz_ 11y ago

Doesn't reflection make lots of things harder to debug and understand? Why should one need to take on the ugly patterns of other ecosystems? It also kills many of the good points of statically typed languages - ie. type safety, ease of optimization, and performance.

joslin01 11y ago
Calling "reflection" an ugly pattern is like calling onions a bad recipe. It's up to you how you intend to use it, but please, let's not be ridiculous and call it an "ugly pattern of other ecosystems." Reflection doesn't get in the way of type safety (in fact, it's generally supported by it) and "ease of optimization" and "performance" is just BS. Ya, sure, sometimes reflection slows things down but web devs who use ruby for 90% of projects don't care about that. I'd love to hear you try and explain how reflection tarnishes "ease of optimization" and why it's so "ugly"
- netheril96 11y ago
  > Web devs who use ruby ... Ruby is not a statically typed language and has nothing to do with type safety or ease of optimization. Reflection for a dynamic language is hardly the same as reflection for static language.
  - joslin01 11y ago
    Good way to take a few words completely out of context. I said "web devs who use ruby for 90% of projects" as in "they obviously don't care much about performance in the first place" If you had anything you wanted to offer, I'm all ears but you telling me dynamic vs static reflection have different implementation details (and necessarily different implications) is pretty obvious, wouldn't you agree?
    - netheril96 11y ago
      I was wondering if you had more experience with Ruby than with a statically typed language like Java, and thus did not see the problem with reflection. Now, to answer your previous question, about how reflection is bad: * Reflection allows one to dynamically add, remove and modify properties and methods, and that breaks type safety. Compilers are no longer able to prove deterministically that a certain object has certain properties or certain methods, or that certain methods have certain signatures because all those may change at runtime. * That which can be dynamically changed must be dynamically resolved. And dynamic resolution is slower. * It breaks encapsulation. It exposes private APIs and allows immutable objects to be modified. That is why its usage is ugly. A dynamically typed language has much less problems with reflection, since in these languages, dynamic resolution is the norm, and they are not amenable to static analysis anyway.