3 ms·

> What was the problem they were trying to solve with Swift? That square brackets were off-putting? If you think this is the difference between programming in

> What was the problem they were trying to solve with Swift? That square brackets were off-putting? If you think this is the difference between programming in Objective-C and Swift, you either haven't used swift much or are very misguided.

tolmasky 10y ago
Although responding to this one cherry-picked snarky statement I made is probably a mistake as its almost certainly clear from, for example, another difference I list in the immediately following sentence, I will bite and state that you probably underestimate the "Objective-C is weird" complex it suffered throughout its entire lifetime, and that that almost certainly contributed to considering writing/approving an entirely new language. Additionally, the reason to call out the square brackets is that many of the other Swift differences could have been integrated into an evolved Objective-C.
- mikeash 10y ago
  That sounds backwards to me. Syntax is fairly trivial, and adding a new syntax for message sends in Objective-C would have been easy. They already did this a bit by adding dot-syntax for accessing properties. Adding other major Swift features to ObjC, like pervasive type inference, generics, and capable value types would be much harder without effectively turning it into a new language. (And yes, I know ObjC got generics recently, but it's not remotely the same as what Swift has.)
  - mpweiher 10y ago
    > Syntax is fairly trivial Logically, yes. Well, only sort of, but that's a different topic. However, emotionally it seems to be of the upmost importance, and developers are just as human as the rest of the world, we just manage to rationalize our prejudices better than most. I've talked to many, many developers as to why they like/enjoy/prefer Swift. A lot of the reasons that are given turn out to be, well, let's just say "less than substantive". And after a bit of digging it pretty much boils down to the "familiar" syntax. YMMV
    - mikeash 10y ago
      That always baffled me. I feel like an experienced developer should be like Cypher in The Matrix. "I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead." But I do realize that it's how some people work, even if I don't get it. In any case, I was talking about the difficulty of making changes to a compiler, not how programmers react to it.
- aplummer 10y ago
  > a mistake as its almost certainly clear from, for example, another difference I list in the immediately following sentence... I didn't reply to that sentence because I didn't want to have to point out your understanding of Objective-C was incorrect, it is not weakly typed, only some Foundation objects are weakly typed. As the other comment here mentions, syntax is trivial (although being informed by 20 years of language design is not so trivial to me day to day), the key differences in overall safety, expressiveness and features in the language is far bigger than trivial method syntax.
  - tolmasky 10y ago
    Uh oh, about to get into an argument over terms that have no precise definition, but I believe that in the context of Objective-C vs. Swift, Objective-C is perfectly fair to be considered weakly typed. In fact I think that in the context of Objective-C vs. most other typed languages it is perfectly fair to consider Objective-C weakly typed, especially when the dominant culture involved using id everywhere and since generics were only added very late in the language so your base collection classes were all weakly typed for 99% of the life of the language. I'd find it really eyebrow-raising for someone to not consider Objective-C "more weakly typed" than Swift, or do you think that Swift did not introduce a culture of stronger typing? But I digress: regardless of whether syntax is trivial or not, my point is that I believe wanting to have a clear break from a syntactic perspective with a language that was plagued as being "different looking" for its entire life was probably a goal in the creation of a new language. Do you really not remember pre-Swift where "Objective-C is weird looking" was an actual argument people would make? Objective-C could have been made more safe, it could not however have its syntax drastically altered without considering it a new language.
  - tolmasky 10y ago
    Also, for the record, before Apple got serious about protocols, AppKit and WebKit were full of respondsToSelector: mumbo-jumbo, so you're just wrong about Objective-C not being weakly typed. If I can type it weakly, then it is weakly typed. And by can I mean can effectively, that is to say, thanks to Objective-C's reflection you can both use id and still interact with it, vs creating an AnyObject type class in a stricter strongly typed language where the compiler will not let you then just call whatever method you want on it. In fact, remnants of this clearly remain in WebKit where you have protocols where every method is optional, and thus everything is respondsToSelector: protected, making a "strongly typed" description highly suspect.

tolmasky 10y ago

Although responding to this one cherry-picked snarky statement I made is probably a mistake as its almost certainly clear from, for example, another difference I list in the immediately following sentence, I will bite and state that you probably underestimate the "Objective-C is weird" complex it suffered throughout its entire lifetime, and that that almost certainly contributed to considering writing/approving an entirely new language. Additionally, the reason to call out the square brackets is that many of the other Swift differences could have been integrated into an evolved Objective-C.

mikeash 10y ago
That sounds backwards to me. Syntax is fairly trivial, and adding a new syntax for message sends in Objective-C would have been easy. They already did this a bit by adding dot-syntax for accessing properties. Adding other major Swift features to ObjC, like pervasive type inference, generics, and capable value types would be much harder without effectively turning it into a new language. (And yes, I know ObjC got generics recently, but it's not remotely the same as what Swift has.)
- mpweiher 10y ago
  > Syntax is fairly trivial Logically, yes. Well, only sort of, but that's a different topic. However, emotionally it seems to be of the upmost importance, and developers are just as human as the rest of the world, we just manage to rationalize our prejudices better than most. I've talked to many, many developers as to why they like/enjoy/prefer Swift. A lot of the reasons that are given turn out to be, well, let's just say "less than substantive". And after a bit of digging it pretty much boils down to the "familiar" syntax. YMMV
  - mikeash 10y ago
    That always baffled me. I feel like an experienced developer should be like Cypher in The Matrix. "I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead." But I do realize that it's how some people work, even if I don't get it. In any case, I was talking about the difficulty of making changes to a compiler, not how programmers react to it.
aplummer 10y ago
> a mistake as its almost certainly clear from, for example, another difference I list in the immediately following sentence... I didn't reply to that sentence because I didn't want to have to point out your understanding of Objective-C was incorrect, it is not weakly typed, only some Foundation objects are weakly typed. As the other comment here mentions, syntax is trivial (although being informed by 20 years of language design is not so trivial to me day to day), the key differences in overall safety, expressiveness and features in the language is far bigger than trivial method syntax.
- tolmasky 10y ago
  Uh oh, about to get into an argument over terms that have no precise definition, but I believe that in the context of Objective-C vs. Swift, Objective-C is perfectly fair to be considered weakly typed. In fact I think that in the context of Objective-C vs. most other typed languages it is perfectly fair to consider Objective-C weakly typed, especially when the dominant culture involved using id everywhere and since generics were only added very late in the language so your base collection classes were all weakly typed for 99% of the life of the language. I'd find it really eyebrow-raising for someone to not consider Objective-C "more weakly typed" than Swift, or do you think that Swift did not introduce a culture of stronger typing? But I digress: regardless of whether syntax is trivial or not, my point is that I believe wanting to have a clear break from a syntactic perspective with a language that was plagued as being "different looking" for its entire life was probably a goal in the creation of a new language. Do you really not remember pre-Swift where "Objective-C is weird looking" was an actual argument people would make? Objective-C could have been made more safe, it could not however have its syntax drastically altered without considering it a new language.
- tolmasky 10y ago
  Also, for the record, before Apple got serious about protocols, AppKit and WebKit were full of respondsToSelector: mumbo-jumbo, so you're just wrong about Objective-C not being weakly typed. If I can type it weakly, then it is weakly typed. And by can I mean can effectively, that is to say, thanks to Objective-C's reflection you can both use id and still interact with it, vs creating an AnyObject type class in a stricter strongly typed language where the compiler will not let you then just call whatever method you want on it. In fact, remnants of this clearly remain in WebKit where you have protocols where every method is optional, and thus everything is respondsToSelector: protected, making a "strongly typed" description highly suspect.