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I agree with you. When Swift was introduced it was billed as a modern replacement for ObjC that was easier to learn, even a good choice as a language for learni

by matt2000 6y ago

I agree with you. When Swift was introduced it was billed as a modern replacement for ObjC that was easier to learn, even a good choice as a language for learning to program. I'm not sure it was ever that, but it sure isn't now. I just got back into a project written in Swift 3 and had to change a bunch of stuff to get it to work in Swift 5. Why? I keep hearing the language is going to be stable "soon" but that doesn't appear to be happening. Swift appears to be a language for the captive audience of iOS devs, who are able to keep up if that's all they're doing. I don't really see it being adopted anywhere else.

wool_gather 6y ago
For what it's worth, source stability is definitely a much firmer constraint now in the minds of the core team: https://forums.swift.org/t/principles-for-trailing-closure-evolution-proposals/37265/18 https://forums.swift.org/t/principles-for-trailing-closure-e... Of course this comes with its own concerns, as you can see from that thread.
skohan 6y ago
To be fair, the pace of source breaking changes has slowed down considerably. From Swift 1 to Swift 3 there were many breaking changes between versions, and automated migration was very necessary. Between 3 and 4 there were some changes, and between 4 and 5 almost no source breaking changes. I think it's actually fair for a new language to take a somewhat cavalier approach to backward compatibility. I would rather not be stuck with all the naive mistakes made in the first version of a language just to avoid migration.
JimDabell 6y ago
> I just got back into a project written in Swift 3 and had to change a bunch of stuff to get it to work in Swift 5. Why? I keep hearing the language is going to be stable "soon" but that doesn't appear to be happening. Swift 3 was released in 2016. Swift is ABI / source / module stable now, but that doesn't make it retroactively stable with a version released four years ago.
seandougall 6y ago
> I keep hearing the language is going to be stable "soon" I think you may be referring to the promises of ABI stability? They kept promising that "soon" starting around Swift 3 (IIRC) and kicking the can down the road for a while there, but it is stable now on Apple's OSes. But I don't recall seeing promises of source stability back then; they were pretty open about the fact that the language was still evolving.

wool_gather 6y ago

For what it's worth, source stability is definitely a much firmer constraint now in the minds of the core team: https://forums.swift.org/t/principles-for-trailing-closure-evolution-proposals/37265/18 https://forums.swift.org/t/principles-for-trailing-closure-e... Of course this comes with its own concerns, as you can see from that thread.

skohan 6y ago

To be fair, the pace of source breaking changes has slowed down considerably. From Swift 1 to Swift 3 there were many breaking changes between versions, and automated migration was very necessary. Between 3 and 4 there were some changes, and between 4 and 5 almost no source breaking changes. I think it's actually fair for a new language to take a somewhat cavalier approach to backward compatibility. I would rather not be stuck with all the naive mistakes made in the first version of a language just to avoid migration.

JimDabell 6y ago

> I just got back into a project written in Swift 3 and had to change a bunch of stuff to get it to work in Swift 5. Why? I keep hearing the language is going to be stable "soon" but that doesn't appear to be happening. Swift 3 was released in 2016. Swift is ABI / source / module stable now, but that doesn't make it retroactively stable with a version released four years ago.

seandougall 6y ago

> I keep hearing the language is going to be stable "soon" I think you may be referring to the promises of ABI stability? They kept promising that "soon" starting around Swift 3 (IIRC) and kicking the can down the road for a while there, but it is stable now on Apple's OSes. But I don't recall seeing promises of source stability back then; they were pretty open about the fact that the language was still evolving.