4 ms·

“Is It Time for Swift?” with Ben Sandofsky

9 points by astigsen 11y ago

timburks 11y ago
Along with the ARC transition, the move from PowerPC to Intel was incredibly smooth (relatively). But much of the work for that was done long before the change actually happened. Both of those changes required very little from developers. Obviously a new language is going to take much more. The biggest challenge with Swift is keeping the programming interface simple. While it gets rid of the @ signs that people stumble over in Objective-C, Swift didn't really reduce the amount of learning required to create a program. Rather, it seems to be everyone's new favorite place to talk about exotic programming concepts, which results in terrifying blog posts like this one: https://developer.ibm.com/swift/2016/01/27/seven-swift-snares-how-to-avoid-them/ https://developer.ibm.com/swift/2016/01/27/seven-swift-snare... I wonder how long it will be before someone like Douglas Crockford shows up with Swift: The Good Parts.
- Grustaf 11y ago
  I think the major advantage for new developers isn't the level of conceptual complexity but much clearer and cleaner syntax, which also happens to be more inline with most other modern popular languages. That's a major advantage.
iteps 11y ago
This was very insightful. My director has been asking why we're not porting to swift yet. I now got the answer. ..."BECAUSE OF YOUR TOXIC DEADLINES".
Grustaf 11y ago
I often hear the argument that "Swift is changing too fast, let's wait until it settles down" but the changes so far have really been minute. It's not even a factor at all for us. Taking our app (40 kloc) and our SDK (4 kloc) from 1.2 to 2 took us less than 3 hours. Almost all changes were correctly migrated by the built in migration tool. The Bro app couldn't possibly take more than 15 minutes.
- sandofsky 11y ago
  Considering the talk didn't show any screenshots, describe all the specifications, or even provide a line count, where are you getting 15 minutes from?
  - Grustaf 11y ago
    From the fact that the app is a clone of Yo.
    - sandofsky 11y ago
      It isn't a clone of "yo." It's based on it. It has a superset of its features. I'd go into detail, but my point is your tone of authority when you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
      - Grustaf 11y ago
        I'm sorry about my tone, but my point is that even our sprawling app was converted almost automatically. The breaking changes are very few, and even fewer of them require any action on the part of the developer (the only exception I can think of is error handling). It can't possibly take a week to migrate Yo, unless you spent months writing it.

9 points by astigsen 11y ago

Along with the ARC transition, the move from PowerPC to Intel was incredibly smooth (relatively). But much of the work for that was done long before the change actually happened. Both of those changes required very little from developers. Obviously a new language is going to take much more. The biggest challenge with Swift is keeping the programming interface simple. While it gets rid of the @ signs that people stumble over in Objective-C, Swift didn't really reduce the amount of learning required to create a program. Rather, it seems to be everyone's new favorite place to talk about exotic programming concepts, which results in terrifying blog posts like this one: https://developer.ibm.com/swift/2016/01/27/seven-swift-snares-how-to-avoid-them/ https://developer.ibm.com/swift/2016/01/27/seven-swift-snare... I wonder how long it will be before someone like Douglas Crockford shows up with Swift: The Good Parts.

Grustaf 11y ago
I think the major advantage for new developers isn't the level of conceptual complexity but much clearer and cleaner syntax, which also happens to be more inline with most other modern popular languages. That's a major advantage.

iteps 11y ago

This was very insightful. My director has been asking why we're not porting to swift yet. I now got the answer. ..."BECAUSE OF YOUR TOXIC DEADLINES".

Grustaf 11y ago

I often hear the argument that "Swift is changing too fast, let's wait until it settles down" but the changes so far have really been minute. It's not even a factor at all for us. Taking our app (40 kloc) and our SDK (4 kloc) from 1.2 to 2 took us less than 3 hours. Almost all changes were correctly migrated by the built in migration tool. The Bro app couldn't possibly take more than 15 minutes.

sandofsky 11y ago
Considering the talk didn't show any screenshots, describe all the specifications, or even provide a line count, where are you getting 15 minutes from?
- Grustaf 11y ago
  From the fact that the app is a clone of Yo.
  - sandofsky 11y ago
    It isn't a clone of "yo." It's based on it. It has a superset of its features. I'd go into detail, but my point is your tone of authority when you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
    - Grustaf 11y ago
      I'm sorry about my tone, but my point is that even our sprawling app was converted almost automatically. The breaking changes are very few, and even fewer of them require any action on the part of the developer (the only exception I can think of is error handling). It can't possibly take a week to migrate Yo, unless you spent months writing it.