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The fact that most devs use _ to work around it surely suggests that it was a pointless idea in the first place. Of all the barmy ideas to make a programming la
by cutler 6y ago
The fact that most devs use _ to work around it surely suggests that it was a pointless idea in the first place. Of all the barmy ideas to make a programming language unique this surely tops the list. As for escaped opening brackets you have to ask why no other language found this necessary. Is the Swift parser really so dumb? These 2 language features prove that however clever a language creator may be he/she can end-up producing features which are frankly absurd.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoNot “most.” Just “many.” I do feel that "most" Swift programmers try to stay within the philosophy; even if only by rote. I tend to eschew argument labels for the first argument; relying on the function name to provide context. That's a pattern that Apple also uses, and comes from ObjC, which came from Smalltalk, so Swift is actually informed by Smalltalk; a venerable OO language. I’m sure that you can do amazing stuff in Perl, and I apologize for my "write-only" crack. It was not conducive to the conversation (which was about PHP). One of the reasons that I don’t use it, is that I guess I never got good enough with it to really sing. The best tools can be misused. Ever see a great musician play a beat-up old Univox, and sound like a chorus of angels, then someone buys a PRS, and sounds like a cat being tortured? We can get hung up on the tools, and forget that the tool is secondary to skill and experience. Well, toe-MAY-toe/toe-MAH-toe. No matter. I’ll keep programming in Swift, and limp along.