[jonathanstrange]

It makes a lot of sense, though. Like many new languages Swift was invented hastily and without much care with the main goal of locking in developers and preventing cross-platform development. If Apple made major releases backwards-compatible, this would invariably turn the language into a big mess in the long run.

This way, the language can evolve into a fine language with many features from Algol-68 and the usual semi-popular C-ish syntax, and Apple can continue to ensure that developers have to maintain a separate codebase for their "apps" that is useless anywhere else.

[jasode]

>Swift was invented hastily and without much care

Swift was started in July 2010 by Chris Lattner[1] and it was publicly announced by Apple in June 2014 (and the 1.0 release was September 2014). Spending 4 years on it and including other programming language experts to contribute to it doesn't seem like a reckless and thoughtless release. What it shows is that even if a group spends years on it, they will still get a lot of things wrong. Same for C# that was (formally) started in January 1999 and not publicly released until December 2002. Even though that language also had 4 years of gestation by smart people, they still got generics and a bunch of other things wrong (e.g. terrible name of "destructors" for the concept of finalizers.)

I didn't realize that programmers thought Swift was created in a hurry like Brendan Eich's "10 days" to design Livescript/Javascript for Netscape Navigator[2]

[1]http://www.nondot.org/sabre/

[2]https://www.quora.com/In-which-10-days-of-May-did-Brendan-Ei...

[cageface]

I like Swift but it really was released too early. There were fundamental problems with the tooling for a long long time after the first release and there has been a lot of churn in the syntax even after the tooling started to settle down.

Designing a language like Swift is hard and it's not reasonable to expect them to get everything right on the first try but I do think it would have benefitted from a lot more dogfooding before they started pushing it on developers.

[jasode]

>There were fundamental problems with the tooling for a long long time after the first release

I was speaking of the language syntax and specification separately from the "tooling." Virtually every language has terrible tooling when it's first released. (e.g. Golang doesn't have a real debugger, Rust build chain on Windows is suboptimal, etc). Yes, Apple's Xcode and Playgrounds were extremely buggy with Swift. Given decades of computing history, it's unfortunate that bugs are to be expected of new programming languages.

There are very few languages that emphasize tooling from the very start. Examples that come to mind would be 4GL type languages (SAP ABAP, Powerbuilder) because those proprietary languages often force you to work inside of their GUI editors. Smalltalk might be another example.

[sho_hn]

> I like Swift but it really was released too early.

Yet it would not be what it is today without the public feedback process that contributed to the changes that were made since that release.

[steveklabnik]

This is short-changing the Swift team on a lot of axes, but you're also wrong about the lack of eventual compatibility:

  > For Swift 4, the primary goals are to deliver on the promise
  > of source stability from 3.0 on, and to provide ABI stability
  > for the standard library.

https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mo...

[feelix]

> and preventing cross-platform development.

One of the features of Swift is being cross platform. A good 20% of the page that this post links to is talking about their cross platform progress for linux and windows. https://swift.org/about/#swiftorg-and-open-source