Re: Need for Swift
Re: Need for Swift
- Subject: Re: Need for Swift
- From: Charles Srstka via Cocoa-dev <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 11:24:09 -0500
> On Oct 12, 2019, at 10:55 AM, Pier Bover via Cocoa-dev
> <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> Yeah I think Apple saw Obj-C as a barrier for developer adoption. I don't
> think that's too far from the truth considering the emphasis on teaching
> Swift to young devs, Playgrounds, the marketing about teenagers making
> their first app, etc.
>
> Swift has its quirks but most people around me prefer it over Obj-C too,
> even experienced devs. From StackOverflow trends and other metrics as soon
> as Swift was announced the popularity of Obj-C declined steadily even when
> it was clear Swift was still not ready for production:
>
> - https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/objective-c/
> <https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/objective-c/>
> - https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=objective-c
> <https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=objective-c>
Swift’s first few versions were awful, but the community has been very
responsive in responding to developer feedback and what we have now is really
quite a nice language, possibly the nicest I’ve used. The string nil checks, in
particular, are something I’ve become a believer in, especially when spending a
bunch of time trying to debug an issue while writing projects in other
languages that turns out to be a nil showing up somewhere where we didn’t
expect it.
The main quibble I have with it is the Objective-C bridge, which contains much
more magic than I’d prefer, and of course certain legacy issues that come along
with having to use the Objective-C frameworks (hello, autorelease pools). When
writing cross-platform code on Linux or something, these complaints are of
course moot. I hope they release a Windows version at some point; I’d really
like to see Swift gain more acceptance as a general-purpose programming
language.
Charles
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