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by cageface
3565 days ago
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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. |
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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.