And that is an interesting experiment and perhaps a worthy goal, but having used Swift for a few years now, I don't think they succeeded at this. I'd say it de

And that is an interesting experiment and perhaps a worthy goal, but having used Swift for a few years now, I don't think they succeeded at this. I'd say it demonstrated that "progressive disclosure" may be a great concept for games, or apps, but there's just way too much difference between someone new to programming and a professional programmer for a language to cover all these cases. Apple doesn't even have a non-pro Final Cut any more. Even in my first few days, having read Apple's Swift documentation, I had to continuously resort to StackOverflow for answers, which frequently sent me to the language grammar (which had many mistakes in it, and I think still does), and the Swift bug tracker. The inflection point on the learning curve is right after "hello world", which makes for great demos, but that's it. Personally, I think even Common Lisp does a better job at progressive disclosure. There's huge areas of CL that you can simply ignore. I worked in CL for years before I bothered to learn about conditions, special variables, or 90% of LOOP's features. In Swift, almost right away I had to read everything related to errors. You can't ignore it, except in the simplest program. I studied generics in college, as part of my data structures class, or maybe my compilers class. I've watched Alexis Gallagher's "PATs" video at least 3 or 4 times. I still don't understand Swift generics. Or maybe I understand what tools are provided, but I don't understand why you'd build (or want) a tool that makes it so hard to, say, define a new type with an "isEqual" method to determine if it's the same as another. Every Swift programmer hits the "protocol can only be used as a generic constraint" phase pretty quick. My complaint with Swift generics was never that they're too simple. It would be great if this were just a corner that PL/type-system geeks could geek out on, but it's an area that you can't ignore.