| > I don't mean they should force people onto Swift. I mean that Swift, should be totally independent of ObjC If you will not provide seamless integration, you will seriously limit amount of people who migrate. There are other problems here too: what should library authors do? Write two versions? > It's been out for years. This is way past 'early adoption'. Looking at all programming languages I've ever used, getting out of this childhood period always took years. Sure, Apple could do better job perhaps in many aspects, but it really takes a very long time to get a language and stdlib to usable shape. >Make Swift a clean break, get rid of some of the more obscure things that make it difficult. If you make a clean break, you limit amount of your users. Without users, you can't tell what obscure things are difficult for those who didn't opt in. I agree with all those beta periods, stability guarantees, docs and training. I am now appreciating more how well those things work in Rust. |
I don't agree at all.
Tons of people are 'starting out' on Swift - moreover - if Swift were done a little better - it would actually be used on other platforms, etc. - as opposed to an 'iPhone only' type thing.
New projects start all the time.
Major re-factors and re-writes happen all the time.
Second - I do not believe that the premise of: "well I can switch some of my code to Swift, but keep most of my libs on ObjC" - is reasonable. This is a minority case.
And of course - as I said - they could have provided access to ObjC libraries through an interface exactly as Android does.
You want to use 'legacy C++ code' on Android? You can do it. It's just not so clean, but you can do it. The same should have been provided for Swift-ObjC
So - companies who don't want to migrate - can stick to ObjC for a few more years.
The rest can switch over.
"If you make a clean break, you limit amount of your users."
Again I don't agree at all. Node.js has more developers than Swift. With Apple backing it (i.e. 'making it good' - but also making it 'the basis for iPhone) - they could have had an incredible number of users.
There's no reason that Swift couldn't have been used in internal-alpha for a while, then external beta for a while - then then have a 'solid v1'.
AS you say - many languages were 'around for a long time' - but they have also been stable for a long time!
Java for example, did not do anything at the .lang level that was not backwards compatible. The only non-backwards compatible bit was java AWT, which they replaced with Swing. But even AWT is still supported!
So, there's no excuse for rapid rollout of versions that are incompatible with one another, no excuses for huge gaps in documentation etc..