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I work in Swift 7 days a week (sadly 7) but I am quite happy despite the changes, it's an open source language built entirely in the open by contributions from

I work in Swift 7 days a week (sadly 7) but I am quite happy despite the changes, it's an open source language built entirely in the open by contributions from people who care. What the hell is there to complain about, would you rather work in 50+ year old cobol? I've used ObjC since the NeXT days and despite much of our codebase (not our part) is still in that language I am always glad to be working on our part in a nice modern language. It's only 3 years old. Go is almost 5 (announced like 8 years ago and started 10), Ruby and Java are antiques in comparison at 20+, ObjC itself is 30 years old, C is 40, C++ is around 25. Rust is about the only comparable aged language, and it isn't used in any single environment as large as iOS and OSX. Swift is 3. Yet it's fun and productive to work in (other than compile times which suck, and debugging which is painful sometimes, and Xcode is ugh). Sure often I have to look up what the current syntax is, but it's still lightyears easier than remembering C++ details (another language I spent a fair amount of time in in the past) which also change from year to year. Debugging STL still gives me nightmares. Cyanide is considered harmful. Opinions are just opinions, but calling something harmful when you just don't like it should be considered silly.

an_d_rew 10y ago
Nailed it.
fiedzia 10y ago
> What the hell is there to complain about, would you rather work in 50+ year old cobol? I'd rather work on modern AND stable language (I actually do, its not Swift, buy that's not my point). Broken code samples is a good reason to complain. Swift is a moving target, it will be for a while, and this is real pain... but its not a secret. If it bothers someone, why would they choose to use it?
- lordnaikon 10y ago
  > I'd rather work on modern AND stable language (I actually do, its not Swift, buy that's not my point) Greetings fellow Rust user ;)
mike_hearn 10y ago
You make it sound like what Swift does is inevitable. Kotlin is of a comparable age to Swift (both started in 2010) and has reached 1.0, which they now plan to maintain Java-like levels of compatibility with. The 1.1 release that's about to come out more or less does that. Certainly any example code you find on the internet today is likely to work fine.
mahyarm 10y ago
Swift reminds me of java/C++ in the early days. Consumed a lot of memory, the JVM was slow, C++ compilers were janky and so on. Swift is definitely an unstable language although, and it has a lot of performance and stability improvements that need to be done with the debugger, source kit and compiler. But this will all be fixed in time, in about 4-5 years I'm guessing. It still is definitely a beta language. Swift work was started 4 years before release, so it's actually a 3+4=7 year language. Every language seems to need a decade before you could call it a stable language I've found, so we have 3 or 4 more years of instability left.

an_d_rew 10y ago

Nailed it.

fiedzia 10y ago

> What the hell is there to complain about, would you rather work in 50+ year old cobol? I'd rather work on modern AND stable language (I actually do, its not Swift, buy that's not my point). Broken code samples is a good reason to complain. Swift is a moving target, it will be for a while, and this is real pain... but its not a secret. If it bothers someone, why would they choose to use it?

lordnaikon 10y ago
> I'd rather work on modern AND stable language (I actually do, its not Swift, buy that's not my point) Greetings fellow Rust user ;)

mike_hearn 10y ago

You make it sound like what Swift does is inevitable. Kotlin is of a comparable age to Swift (both started in 2010) and has reached 1.0, which they now plan to maintain Java-like levels of compatibility with. The 1.1 release that's about to come out more or less does that. Certainly any example code you find on the internet today is likely to work fine.

mahyarm 10y ago

Swift reminds me of java/C++ in the early days. Consumed a lot of memory, the JVM was slow, C++ compilers were janky and so on. Swift is definitely an unstable language although, and it has a lot of performance and stability improvements that need to be done with the debugger, source kit and compiler. But this will all be fixed in time, in about 4-5 years I'm guessing. It still is definitely a beta language. Swift work was started 4 years before release, so it's actually a 3+4=7 year language. Every language seems to need a decade before you could call it a stable language I've found, so we have 3 or 4 more years of instability left.