Stefan Mileschin

After four years developer writes "Dear John" to Swift

Four years after it was released to the enthusiasic applause of the Tame Apple Press, a group of developers have been looking at the progress of Apple's programming language Swift and found that Jobs' Mob created a chocolate teapot.

Dominik Wagner wondered what exactly Swift was trying to solve. The continued existence of programming languages such as Lua, Objective-C, Erlang, and Ruby (on Rails) serves a purpose, even if they have issues. Swift was touted to be more modern, the future, super cool and the one ring of programming languages. At the time, we wondered. Apple's own software skills had progressively slipped so it was unclear how it was going to write any software let alone a whole language.

Swift chose to be opinionated about features of Objective-C, which developers thought were virtues, not problems. Many apps that would have just compiled fine if done in Objective-C either can't take advantage of new features of the devices easily, or had to be taken out of the App Store alltogether, because upgrading would be too costly.

It also did not play nice with Apple's own framework ecosystem. Wagner said that Apple did a great job on exposing Cocoa/Foundation as graspable into Swift as they could,but Swift wants to impose its own rules on the design paradigms that created the existing frameworks. Since this is a design problem, it cant be fixed just mitigated.

https://fudzilla.com/news/46516-appl...ot-up-to-snuff