4 ms·

I knew there was some churn in the Swift language but didn't think it was going to continue. I'm not using Swift now but will likely hold off a bit longer as a

I knew there was some churn in the Swift language but didn't think it was going to continue. I'm not using Swift now but will likely hold off a bit longer as a result. I did think they nailed the open source launch. Swift on the server is an exciting prospect, more competition is always good. While I'm not a Swift dev yet (I don't have a Mac thus mainly interested in the libre crossplatform launch), I've been keeping my eye on it with Swift Weekly. I think 2016-2017 could well be the year(s) of Swift's ascension.

lpsz 11y ago
Have been using Swift since late 2014 (having used ObjC for many years prior to that). Even with the occasional churn (eg move to 2.0 or 2.1), the sheer gain in productivity due to brevity, type checking, cleaner closures, and various other language features, easily outweighs any costs. I find myself being able to do more with less code, and cleaner code. It's cognitively way easier to build bigger abstractions. We do have a few legacy bits that makes no business reason to port at this point, but Swift-to-legacy interop works well, too. I would say the biggest step that made things usable was introduction of incremental builds in 1.2.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  > the sheer gain in productivity due to brevity, type checking, cleaner closures, and various other language features, easily outweighs any costs. Serious question: do you have a metric you are using to measure that, or is it just kind of a "gut feeling?"
cellularmitosis 11y ago
I think that approach (waiting to adopt) makes sense if you aren't already an ObjC developer. Less to unlearn. However, for an ObjC dev, waiting to adopt is only going to put you further behind the curve (the hard part won't be absorbing the changes from Swift 2 to Swift 3, its dropping your ObjC habits and learning what it means to write idiomatic Swift (which isn't going to drastically change between Swift revisions)).

lpsz 11y ago

Have been using Swift since late 2014 (having used ObjC for many years prior to that). Even with the occasional churn (eg move to 2.0 or 2.1), the sheer gain in productivity due to brevity, type checking, cleaner closures, and various other language features, easily outweighs any costs. I find myself being able to do more with less code, and cleaner code. It's cognitively way easier to build bigger abstractions. We do have a few legacy bits that makes no business reason to port at this point, but Swift-to-legacy interop works well, too. I would say the biggest step that made things usable was introduction of incremental builds in 1.2.

ktRolster 11y ago
> the sheer gain in productivity due to brevity, type checking, cleaner closures, and various other language features, easily outweighs any costs. Serious question: do you have a metric you are using to measure that, or is it just kind of a "gut feeling?"

cellularmitosis 11y ago

I think that approach (waiting to adopt) makes sense if you aren't already an ObjC developer. Less to unlearn. However, for an ObjC dev, waiting to adopt is only going to put you further behind the curve (the hard part won't be absorbing the changes from Swift 2 to Swift 3, its dropping your ObjC habits and learning what it means to write idiomatic Swift (which isn't going to drastically change between Swift revisions)).