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Greg's avatar

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.

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Dwight's avatar

Kind of like C++?

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Almatbek's avatar

Great Post

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Rob's avatar
Jan 11Edited

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).

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Shady Mostafa's avatar

Great article. Thanks!

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c_turtle's avatar

Dude they had Objective-C - it was dead simple! It's basically python with shitty syntax. All they had to to do is add some syntax sugar to Objective-C, maybe with Python-style dunder-methods, and they could've had a cleaner, more practical language than Swift will ever be at a fraction of the effort.

Instead they did C++ 2.0 for no reason at all. It's sooo stupid, and I don't even wanna imagine how much time and effort was wasted on this ridiculous crap.

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Robin's avatar

Great piece thanks!

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gonsolo's avatar

It's the front-runner with 221 keywords now: https://github.com/gonsolo/keywords

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