[hhas01]

“I think they've done an incredible job with their ObjC interop, given said mismatch.”

Which is to say, the Swift devs have done an incredible job of solving the wrong problem.

Apple needed a modern language for faster, easier Cocoa development. What they got was one that actually devalues Apple’s 30-year Cocoa investment by treating it as a second-class citizen. Gobsmacking hubris!

Swift was a pet project of Lattner’s while he was working on LLVM that got picked up by Apple management and repurposed to do a job it wasn’t designed for.

Swift should’ve stayed as Lattner’s pet project, and the team directed to build an “Objective-C 3.0”, with the total freedom to break traditional C compatibility in favor of compile-time safety, type inference, decent error handling, and eliminating C’s various baked-in syntactic and semantic mistakes. Leave C compatibility entirely to ObjC 2.0, and half the usability problems Swift has immediately go away. The result—a modern dynamic language that feels like a scripting language while running like a compiled one, which treats Cocoa as a first-class citizen, not as a strap-on.

(Bonus if it also acts as an easy upgrade path for existing C code. “Safe-C” has been tried before with the likes of Cyclone and Fortress, but Apple might’ve actually made it work.)

Tony Hoare called NULL a billion-dollar mistake. Swift is easily a 10-million-man-hour mistake and counting. For a company that once prided itself for its perfectly-polished cutting-edge products, #SwiftLang is so very staid and awkward-fitting.

[cmrdporcupine]

I don't have enough experience with Swift to agree or disagree with you about it, but it strikes me that there were already Smalltalk-like languages out there that fit this niche somewhat -- such as F-Script -- and Apple could have gone down that road instead of shoehorning Swift into the role.

Objective C already had Smalltalk-style message dispatch syntax, and something fairly close to Smalltalk blocks/lambdas. So it's not like existing Cocoa programmers would have been frustrated or confused.

Clearly the original NeXT engineers were inspired by Smalltalk and wanted something like it, but had performance concerns etc, perhaps there would have been performance concerns with moving to a VM based environment for mobile devices, but I think with a modern JIT these problems could be alleviated. As we've seen with V8, etc..

So I think it was actually a missed opportunity for Smalltalk to finally have its day in the sun :-)

[hhas01]

Agreed. Swift is a language designed by and for compiler engineers; and it shows. Contrast Smalltalk which was designed by and for users and usability. Chalk and cheese at every level—especially user level.

Alas, I think decades of C has trained programmers to expect and accept lots and lots of manual drudgework and unhelpful flakiness; worse, it’s selected for the type of programmer who actively enjoys that sort of mindless makework and brittleness. Busyness vs productivity; minutiae vs expressivity. Casual complexity vs rigorous parsimony.

Call me awkward, but I firmly believe good language design means good UI/UX design. Languages exist for humans, not hardware, after all. Yet the UX of mainstream languages today is less than stellar.

(Me, I came into programming through automation so unreasonably expect the machines to do crapwork for me.)

Re. JIT, I’m absolutely fine with baking down to machine code when you already know what hardware you’re targeting. (x86 is just another level of interpretation.) So I don’t think that was it; it was just that Lattner &co were C++ fans and users, so shaped the language to please themselves. Add right time, right place, and riding high on (deserved) reputation for LLVM work. Had they been Smalltalk or Lisp fans we might’ve gotten something more like Dylan instead. While I can use Swift just fine (and certainly prefer it over C++), that I would have enjoyed. Ah well.

[cmrdporcupine]

I mean, I work in C++ all day (chromecast code base @ Google), and I like the language. But I also know where it does and doesn't belong. For application development, particularly _third party_ app dev, it makes no sense. And neither did Objective C, which is the worst of both worlds. I had to work in it for a while and it's awful.

I agree Dylan (or something like it) would have been a good choice, except that it wouldn't mate well with the Smalltalk style keyword/selector arguments in Cocoa, also it has the taint of being associated with the non-Jobs years and so maybe there would have been ... political... arguments against it.

They just needed a Smalltalk dialect with Algolish/Cish syntactic sugar to calm people down, and optional or mandatory static typing to making tooling work better.