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Using swift feels like you are living in a house that once had a interior designer build it from the ground up, but then his meth head friends come over for a p

by AJRF 3y ago

Using swift feels like you are living in a house that once had a interior designer build it from the ground up, but then his meth head friends come over for a party one weekend and never left. The direction of the language is of breaking changes that really should be breaking, secret development of features that then get thrown onto the community during a keynote and just an unfathomable amount of complexity and cruft building up in every corner. Seriously, I would hate to learn Swift now, I barely tolerate it having grown up with it. Swift 3 was almost perfect. I loved it. If they had of added async/await to Swift 3 I would use it for everything.

miffy900 3y ago
They tried to reinvent C++, when really they should've reinvented C and sprinkled Obj-C classes and protocols on top.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Christian Laettner is quite clear that Swift was a reinventation of Objective-C, and most Objective-C 2.0 improvements and latter ones, were already with Swift interoperability in mind. As for C remark, our computers have long stopped being a PDP-11 clone.
  - miffy900 3y ago
    > Christian Laettner is quite clear that Swift was a reinventation of Objective-C, and most Objective-C 2.0 improvements and latter ones, were already with Swift interoperability in mind. Yeah, I'm sure he said that at the outset in 2014 when Swift launched, but in 2023, that's not where Swift ended up. > As for C remark, our computers have long stopped being a PDP-11 clone. There is absolutely no need for a language like Swift to be as complex and bloated as it is; browse the language spec, and about 50% could be discarded and you'd still have a very complex langauge. The Swift team would do well to take inspiration from C and keep it simple; just stop adding new langauge features and let the existing language breathe. Full stop. Each new release keeps adding new features without any regard to how new ones negatively interact with previous ones. It's a language being designed by compiler engineers and not app developers. And don't get me started on the bloated language parser - editing Swift projects beyond a certain size in Xcode still gets abysmally slow. All they need to do is lock down a core subset of the language and just fix bugs; make the compiler engineers speed up the parser. That's it.

by AJRF 3y ago

miffy900 3y ago

They tried to reinvent C++, when really they should've reinvented C and sprinkled Obj-C classes and protocols on top.

pjmlp 3y ago
Christian Laettner is quite clear that Swift was a reinventation of Objective-C, and most Objective-C 2.0 improvements and latter ones, were already with Swift interoperability in mind. As for C remark, our computers have long stopped being a PDP-11 clone.
- miffy900 3y ago
  > Christian Laettner is quite clear that Swift was a reinventation of Objective-C, and most Objective-C 2.0 improvements and latter ones, were already with Swift interoperability in mind. Yeah, I'm sure he said that at the outset in 2014 when Swift launched, but in 2023, that's not where Swift ended up. > As for C remark, our computers have long stopped being a PDP-11 clone. There is absolutely no need for a language like Swift to be as complex and bloated as it is; browse the language spec, and about 50% could be discarded and you'd still have a very complex langauge. The Swift team would do well to take inspiration from C and keep it simple; just stop adding new langauge features and let the existing language breathe. Full stop. Each new release keeps adding new features without any regard to how new ones negatively interact with previous ones. It's a language being designed by compiler engineers and not app developers. And don't get me started on the bloated language parser - editing Swift projects beyond a certain size in Xcode still gets abysmally slow. All they need to do is lock down a core subset of the language and just fix bugs; make the compiler engineers speed up the parser. That's it.