I agree with the sentiment. Swift was conceived and promoted as being simple, but it rapidly became a "Christmas tree" where everyone wants to hang something new on it.
While this might be ok for people who spend every waking moment using Swift, the constant changes and evolution make it very difficult for new people to use or part time users to keep up.
The worst thing of all is the language is no longer intuitive and the syntax resembles hieroglyphics.
I agree with the sentiment. Swift was conceived and promoted as being simple, but it rapidly became a "Christmas tree" where everyone wants to hang something new on it.
While this might be ok for people who spend every waking moment using Swift, the constant changes and evolution make it very difficult for new people to use or part time users to keep up.
The worst thing of all is the language is no longer intuitive and the syntax resembles hieroglyphics.
Great Post
While I agree overall, I'm hesitant to look back too fondly on Lattner. Remember his work on Swift for Tensorflow (S4T), with the goal of merging it back into Swift itself? S4T was abandoned, but not before a load of its supporting features were (partially) integrated into the compiler, particular for differentiation (https://github.com/dan-zheng/swift/blob/master/docs/DifferentiableProgramming.md) and calling Python directly from Swift (https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals/0216-dynamic-callable.md).
Great article. Thanks!