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by bsaul 3145 days ago
stability is also helped by stagnant functionnalities. Swift is only 4 yo and aims at "total domination" aka both server client and system dev. it's perfectly fine for it to keep evolving, as long as it hasn't stepped a solid foot in each domain it's aiming at.

objc otoh isn't good and will never be good for anything other than appleOS development. i don't think betting on that tech today makes any sense. it lived a revival thanks to iOS , and it'll probably die when that platform has completed moving to swift.
1 comments
mdhughes 3145 days ago
OS X, iOS, and all new APIs consumed by Swift on those platforms are written in Obj-C or C++, never in Swift. So what's "stagnant"?

It's true that few others have adopted Objective-C, GNU & MS occasional efforts aside. Which is why I keep a number of languages in practice.

But fragile, power-hungry, slow-compiling Swift isn't going to beat out stable Java, or easy JS or PHP on servers, and outside iOS/OS X, building desktop software needs UI toolkit support and stability.

Which is my point: Building in Swift is total technical debt.

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bsaul 3145 days ago
i guess it all comes down to whether you believe swift is going to get better with time and solve its current issues ( the ones you mention),or if it's inherently a bad design. I'm betting on compilation speed and fragility improving a lot in the next two years. What matters to me is that the language type system is among the best ( enums and optionals) , and the general feeling when coding with the language is a real joy.

For objc, however I've never been able to say anything better than "i got used to it".

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apple4ever 3144 days ago
> Which is my point: Building in Swift is total technical debt.

That's the truth. Swift makes it easy to build clever, unmaintainable code.

The beauty of Objective-C is it is readable! And then easily maintainable.

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