Thursday, June 4, 2015

Why I Don’t Write Swift

Soroush Khanlou:

Trying to use Swift in any professional capacity is a joke. A very cruel joke. The “tooling” is terrible: compilation speed has been abysmal, and SourceKit spent the better part of the year as a punchline.

[…]

There’s so much new stuff to learn about. But it’s not the good kind of learning, where you expand your mind and discover new ways of thinking and working. It’s rote memorization of the six new inscrutable ways to make readonly properties. Learning that stuff won’t make you a better programmer or thinker, it’ll make you better at working around Swift.

[…]

Don’t get me wrong: that doesn’t mean I don’t think I can write great Swift ever, or that it’s not worth learning. It’s just not worth shipping code in right now. I love reading the blog posts, with people exploring and researching and trying to understand all the new things we can make.

4 Comments RSS · Twitter

It definitely is production ready. SourceKit has been mostly stable since Xcode 6.3.1 and we don't really have a problem with compilation on somewhat big project, granted we have mac pros.

"It definitely is production ready."

Swift is ready for people who like writing code. Not for people who like developing products.

And, please, SourceKit may be stable but it's quite buggy and very dumb.

When you type "func something(n" , the completion mechanism suggests NSString.

Sorry, I have to disagree with the quoted premises... sure, you may not _like_ the changes in swift, but they are the language and you can either learn it or stay with the past language until it's deprecated... your call... no rush...

But, please don't attribute this to the language rather than your inertness/apathy...

Swift is Apple's Java - language for corporate drones and other dummies, who cannot be trusted wit dynamic language. Therefore ideally suited for outsorcing payroll processing and other groundbreaking software development to India.

Unlike objc which enabled nexstep and mac os x, and ruby which enabled ruby on rails.

Straightjacket lamguages like Java and Swift do have its purpose, but it is not creative application development.

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