Erica Sadun:
Say you’re working with a type and you want to throw an error that reflects the context of where it originates. You can do that, mostly, using a few built-in compiler keywords. __FUNCTION__, __LINE__, and __FILE__ provide literal interpolation about the details of a calling function[…]
[…]
Use a protocol to automatically pick up on type context. The default implementation in the following Contextualizable extension refers to self.dynamicType in a way that a method signature cannot.
I’ve long been doing this sort of thing in Objective-C with macros. It’s a bug help when debugging or tracking down what happened on a customer’s Mac. Unlike the macros, this won’t build up a stack trace of how the error was propagated, although you could approximate that using -[NSThread callStackSymbols].
Previously: Swift and Cocoa Error Handling, JSErrorStackTrace, NSXReturnThrowError.
Macros NSError Programming Swift Programming Language
Jean-Louis Gassée (comments):
Parkinson’s Law tells us that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. Applied to software, this means that applications tend to bloatware, obese programs whose complexity makes them nearly impossible to debug and maintain. Today, we look at happier counterexamples, past and current, of ambitious products created by “hermit programmers”.
[…]
As it turns out, the size and complexity of operating systems and development tools do not pose completely insurmountable obstacles; we still find programs of hefty import authored by one person. One such example is Preview, Mac’s all-in-one file viewing and editing program. While the Wikipedia article is out of date and tepid, the two-part Macworld article titled The many superpowers of Apple’s Preview (here and here) does justice to the app’s power and flexibility. Read it and join me in my appreciation for this labor of love from a solo, unnamed programmer who, I’m told, has been at it since the NeXT days.
[…]
Newer than Preview but no less ambitious, we have Gus Mueller’s Acorn, an “Image Editor for Humans”, now in version 5 at the Mac App Store. To get an idea of the breadth and depth of the app, scan the documentation on the company’s web site.
Acorn Apple II Apple Writer Craft History Mac Mac App Pinball Construction Set Preview.app Programming VisiCalc
Chris Adamson:
In a nutshell, Facebook doesn’t want developers pre-populating posts for users, at all. It’s not good enough to allow the user to edit or delete the post you’ve prepared for them, you can’t offer them post contents at all.
And somehow, they are able to enforce this programmatically.
My boss was gobsmacked when I told him this on Slack and could hardly believe it. Can Facebook seriously hack the iOS frameworks to get this behavior? How is that technically possible, and even if they can, how are they still in the App Store?
Or, does Apple let them do it? One plausible scenario here is that since Facebook and Apple are special friends – enough so to have Facebook deeply integrated into Settings, Contacts, and elsewhere – iOS looks to see if the Facebook app is present, and hands off the compose logic to a controller provided by Facebook if so.
Facebook iOS iOS 8 iOS App
Michael O. Church:
Of course, all of this that I am slinging at OOP is directed at a culture. Is object-oriented programming innately that way? Not necessarily. In fact, I think that it’s pretty clear Alan Kay’s vision (“IQ is a lead weight”) was the opposite of that. His point was that, when complexity occurs, it should be encapsulated behind a simpler interface. That idea, now uncontroversial and realized within functional programming, was right on. Files and sockets, for example, are complex beasts in implementation, but manageable specifically because they tend to conform to simpler and well-understood interfaces: you can read without having to care whether you’re manipulating a robot arm in physical space (i.e. reading a hard drive) or pulling data out of RAM (memory file) or taking user input from the “file” called “standard input”. Alan Kay was not encouraging the proliferation of complex objects; he was simply looking to build a toolset that enables to people to work with complexity when it occurs. One should note that major object-oriented victories (concepts like “file” and “server”) are no longer considered “object-oriented programming”, just as “alternative medicine” that works is recognized as just “medicine”.
[…]
Where is this whole argument leading? First, there’s a concept in game design of “dryness”. A game that is dry is abstract, subtle, generally avoiding or limiting the role of random chance, and while the game may be strategically deep, it doesn’t have immediate thematic appeal. Go is a great game, and it’s also very dry. It has white stones and black stones and a board, but that’s it. No wizards, no teleportation effects, not even castling. You put a stone on the board and it sits there forever (unless the colony is surrounded and it dies). Go also values control and elegance, as programmers should. We want our programs to be “dry” and boring. We want the problems that we solve to be interesting and complex, but the code itself should be so elegant as to be “obvious”, and elegant/obvious things are (in this way) “boring”.
Alan Kay Craft Game Haskell Programming Language Java Programming
Russ Bishop:
A new try? keyword has been added. This attempts an operation that may throw (fail). If it succeeds the result is wrapped in an optional. If it fails the error is ignored and nil is returned. This seems like a pragmatic compromise but I have to imagine someone lost a battle somewhere because a lot of programmers are going to slap a try? on it and ignore all errors.
This is a good addition that was suggested last month. I’m not worried about errors being ignored because the compiler warns if the result of try? is unused. It lets you ignore the specific error that you got, but you still have to handle the fact that there was an error.
Variadic parameters can appear anywhere in the parameter list; presumably the compiler disambiguates them by type and/or by consuming values off the right-hand side of argument list until the non-variadic arguments are satisfied.
It looks to me like it’s simpler than that, and you simply use a named parameter to signal the end of the variadic parameter. Perhaps in the future it will be possible to support multiple variadic parameters in this way. For now, the main benefit is that you can more easily use trailing closures.
extend was renamed appendContentsOf and splice was renamed insertContentsOf
It’s good to see Apple keeping some of Foundation’s good ideas.
Most APIs that take closures or @autoclosure parameters use rethrows properly so you can pass throwing methods to map, filter, etc. It also allows short-circuiting operators like &&, ||, or ?? to work with expressions that throw.
This should make error handling easier than before.
There are still some bugs, though:
Declaring multiple globals in a single var or let may cause corruption of their values; the workaround is to declare them with separate var or let statements.
Erica Sadun:
You can combine try? with ?? for fallback values but you must surround the try in parens[…]
Erica Sadun:
Beta 6 introduces a lazy property on sequences.
[…]
This property is implemented in CollectionType, LazyCollectionType, and LazySequenceType extensions. You use it to delay evaluation on things like map and filter that are normally eager.
Erica Sadun:
Join has become joinWithSeparator, which you call after a sequence, interposing a separator between the elements of a sequence.
Language Design NSError Programming Swift Programming Language
Graham Lee (comments):
And so it’s sad to see scripting die out as the popular platforms for application development fail to support it. Instead of the personal control of the script – I will take this information from that app, and put this part of it in that app – we have the corporate control of the API. This app maker and that app maker are BFFs, sign in here to let them share everything. After all, they know best.
Ultimately the death of scripting is hubristic. We know how you want to use a computer. If you’re trying to do something that we didn’t sell to you, you must be holding it wrong.
Graham Lee:
There’s bash, and powershell, and ruby, and…even Perl is still popular among sysadmins. There’s never been a better time to be a programmer or other IT professional trying to automate a task.
True, but there’s never been a worse time for someone who doesn’t care about computers to use a computer to automate a task. Apps are in-your-face “experiences” to be “used”, and for the most part can’t be glued together.
Brent Simmons:
There are counter-examples, of course — the apps I work on (Mac versions of OmniFocus and OmniOutliner) are highly scriptable. But the trend toward silos, sandboxing, and highly-controlled experiences is clear.
(First thing I did was look to see if Slack has a scripting dictionary. Of course not. Neither does HipChat. Apps these days.)
Update (2015-08-27): Dr. Drang:
I think Lee’s pessimism is temporally misplaced—at least in the Apple world. While I’d never say that scripting Apple devices is in an ideal state, the situation certainly looks better than it did two or three years ago.
[…]
Things are still more locked down on the iOS side, but we now have app extensions to ease some of the pain and Workflow for more complicated interapp trickery.
AppleScript Bash iOS Mac Programming Terminal
