Slashdot Mirror
Four Years On, Developers Ponder The Real Purpose of Apple's Swift Programming Language (monkeydom.de)
Programming languages such as Lua, Objective-C, Erlang, and Ruby (on Rails) offer distinct features, but they are also riddled with certain well-documented drawbacks. However, writes respected critic Dominik Wagner, their origination and continued existence serves a purpose. In 2014, Apple introduced Swift programming language. It has been four years, but Wagner and many developers who have shared the blog post over the weekend, wonder what exactly is Swift trying to solve as they capture the struggle at least a portion of developers who are writing in Swift face today. Writes Wagner: Swift just wanted to be better, more modern, the future -- the one language to rule them all. A first red flag for anyone who ever tried to do a 2.0 rewrite of anything.
On top of that it chose to be opinionated about features of Objective-C, that many long time developers consider virtues, not problems: Adding compile time static dispatch, and making dynamic dispatch and message passing a second class citizen and introspection a non-feature. Define the convenience and elegance of nil-message passing only as a source of problems. Classify the implicit optionality of objects purely as a source of bugs. [...] It keeps defering the big wins to the future while it only offered a very labour intensive upgrade path. Without a steady revenue stream, 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 to costly. If you are working in the indie dev-scene, you probably know one of those stories as well. And while this is supposed to be over now, this damage has been done and is real.
On top of all of this, there is that great tension with the existing Apple framework ecosystem. While Apple did a great job on exposing Cocoa/Foundation as graspable into Swift as they could, there is still great tension in the way Swift wants to see the world, and the design paradigms that created the existing frameworks. That tension is not resolved yet, and since it is a design conflict, essentially can't be resolved. Just mitigated. From old foundational design patterns of Cocoa, like delegation, data sources, flat class hierarchies, over to the way the collection classes work, and how forgiving the API in general should be. If you work in that world you are constantly torn between doing things the Swift/standard-library way, or the Cocoa way and bridging in-between. To make matters worse there are a lot of concepts that don't even have a good equivalent. This, for me at least, generates an almost unbearable mental load.
On top of that it chose to be opinionated about features of Objective-C, that many long time developers consider virtues, not problems: Adding compile time static dispatch, and making dynamic dispatch and message passing a second class citizen and introspection a non-feature. Define the convenience and elegance of nil-message passing only as a source of problems. Classify the implicit optionality of objects purely as a source of bugs. [...] It keeps defering the big wins to the future while it only offered a very labour intensive upgrade path. Without a steady revenue stream, 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 to costly. If you are working in the indie dev-scene, you probably know one of those stories as well. And while this is supposed to be over now, this damage has been done and is real.
On top of all of this, there is that great tension with the existing Apple framework ecosystem. While Apple did a great job on exposing Cocoa/Foundation as graspable into Swift as they could, there is still great tension in the way Swift wants to see the world, and the design paradigms that created the existing frameworks. That tension is not resolved yet, and since it is a design conflict, essentially can't be resolved. Just mitigated. From old foundational design patterns of Cocoa, like delegation, data sources, flat class hierarchies, over to the way the collection classes work, and how forgiving the API in general should be. If you work in that world you are constantly torn between doing things the Swift/standard-library way, or the Cocoa way and bridging in-between. To make matters worse there are a lot of concepts that don't even have a good equivalent. This, for me at least, generates an almost unbearable mental load.
They already have one for consumers, this just makes it easier to put one up for developers.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Apps written in different languages are hard to compile across platforms.
Don't look for reasons why Swift may be technically superior. Look for reasons why Apple wants Swift to keep developers locked inside the Apple world. Every minute that a developer uses to learn Swift, is a minute not spent on learning a non-Apple technology.
After writing an entire application stack in Obj-C / Cocoa (ExactScan, OCRKit, ...) we will not continue using Apple only technology. To much vendor lock in, too much extra work porting and sharing code with other platforms. Yes, Swift may be partially vendor neutral, however all the Cocoa / AppKit / UIKit et al. APIs do not help, and Swift is otherwise not too native on Linux and Windows.
The only criteria that's relevant if you're already supporting a profitable application on either iOS or OS X platforms - maintainable. How fast does a language enable the rev of your code base, does it abstract your code base above platforms and can its libraries and API's bridge between manufacturer hardware swaps and recompiles without cost of a total rewrite.
Those were lessons learned during NeXT transitions from little to big endian and Mac OS X revs that Apple made 3X/yr during SteveJobs reign.
Firstly itâ(TM)s not lock in any more than objc is. No other (serious) platform uses objc. So stop whining about lock in. Programmers on the Apple platforms donâ(TM)t give a crap about that anyway. Weâ(TM)re there because we want to be. And most of us learned objc after learning other languages, because the iOS sdk hasnâ(TM)t been around forever, so we all came from other languages. We arenâ(TM)t so stupid we canâ(TM)t learn something else, kthx.
Secondly it addresses some real pain points from objc. One is verbosity. Another is the fact that nil objects donâ(TM)t crash the app which makes bugs hard to find. Inconsistent message vs function call syntax. Inconsistent property vs method syntax. I could go on and on.
Thirdly it addresses type safety. Objc will let you have an array of id, which is like having an array of java.lang.Object and trusting the programmer to use it appropriately. Anyone who argues that strong type safety isnâ(TM)t better has never worked outside of some niche application. This is enough of a pain point with objc that it deserves its own paragraph.
Fourthly it brings functional programming to the table better than objc. Yes you can pass blocks around in objc but itâ(TM)s syntactically painful where as Swift makes it easy (aka first class citizen).
I could continue but Iâ(TM)m tired of typing on my phone. The point is there actually are plenty of real world gains in Swift.
Outside of /. where everyoneâ(TM)s mind is already made up and Apple is the devil, I donâ(TM)t know anyone that has used swift for real who doesnâ(TM)t think itâ(TM)s massively superior to objc.
Is it finalized? No. Itâ(TM)s a language in flux and theyâ(TM)re taking community feedback too. So everyone is an early adopter by definition and they expect some upgrade pain. Itâ(TM)s really not that bad in practice and Xcode handles 90% of it. Itâ(TM)s no worse than switching to a new iOS version and dealing with depreciations every year.
Again, weâ(TM)ve all chosen the platform and the language because we think itâ(TM)s superior. We arenâ(TM)t stupid. We arenâ(TM)t locked in. We all know other languages. Thanks.
Cue the haters.
There is a pattern and it is like this
- School do not teach anymore why things are done the way they are, the reasons
- Students are not interested, have low attention span, generally consider the teaching "old stuff"
- Computer science is populated by freshers, you are old at 40
the result is:
- Reinventing the same solution, worse
How to stop this total waste of time,money ?
- Keep older developer around and when they say that the "new shiny idea" has been done before, listen to them.
A list of already done things:
1) AI (in the current form), it is Neural net, learned 30 years ago, yes, now you have a supercomputer on desk but it is not new tech and has all the same issues it had before.
2) Blockchain, can anybody think of a revision system ? GIT, SVN ?
3) Languages, lots of them, really, are we so dumb that to save a few keystrokes we produce something that is obscure after the third line ?
Can we agree that all possible logic and consistency tests should be done at "compile time" ? (no Unit testing is not the same thing)
FInally, a question: How do we get rid of the pointy haired boss ? (See Dilbert)
He knows nothing, makes random decisions (on a good day) and sucks half of the budget in bonuses...