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I wonder how long we will keep hearing the complaint that Swift keeps changing. I never saw that as a problem at all, 99% of the changes have been for the bette
by Grustaf 9y ago
I wonder how long we will keep hearing the complaint that Swift keeps changing. I never saw that as a problem at all, 99% of the changes have been for the better, and most of the time it's exactly the things I have wanted them to change, or add.
For the first few days after the announcement I couldn't see the point of Swift, why did Apple feel they needed a new language? It's not like there was a dearth of developers in objc. I started reading the Swift book from Apple though, and when I finished it a few days later I was hooked. Since then I haven't voluntarily written a single line of objc.
Of course circumstances may vary but for us migrations between Swift versions, even the biggest ones, have never taken more than 2 hours. Learning the new syntax as a developer I see exclusively as a positive, it's exciting to see how it develops. WWDC is Swift Christmas.
Again, each project and each developer is different but I can't shake the feeling that at least some of the objections raised by obj c diehards sound like pretexts, especially the talk about the language being in flux. It's not like you're forced to adopt the new version immediately, and in any case APIs also change. It's just part of the job. And Swift can't improve if it's not allowed to evolve.
- jasonwelk 9y agoAgreed. Willingness to break backwards compatibility is good in pursuit of a better language. wish C++ did this!
- kazagistar 9y agoI thought they were pretry clear about why churn was bad: - Many examples are older, and don't compile anymore. - Code maintenence costs increase for long term "write it and forget it" code. I don't have a hrose in this race, but when I heard Swift was making breaking changes, I had an immediate negative reaction.
- Grustaf 9y agoHow else could it be improved? The alternative would be to work on it in house for a few more years and only then release it to the world. I think it’s much better to let it be used by millions of developers in real apps and learn from that experience. Migrating code to newer versions is seldom a big problem, and it’s even smoother now when you can run several versions in the same app.