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by skohan 2074 days ago
I totally agree with your point about SwiftUI: that also was a moment where I started looking to other languages in terms of what I should invest my energy in for the next few years due to the problems in governance with the language.

On the point of "swift world domination", I still think this is largely a PR problem. I think Swift's identity as "compiled python" could make it a very good fit for many use cases where scripting languages are currently being used, due to it's clean, high level syntax and powerful type system. It still suffers a chicken-and-egg problem with respect to broader tooling and library support since it's viewed overwhelmingly as a language for making iOS apps.
1 comments
tl 2074 days ago
"Swift world domination" is from Chris Lattner, Swift's author. He proposed that Swift could simultaneously be better at text manipulation than Perl, data science than Python, high-performance compute than C, more expressive than Ruby, etc... The result is a language ideal for no one and pushed heavily by Apple.

Swift as a "compiled python" loses to Go, and that not even Go's design goal (though it is a fairly common use of it).

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skohan 2074 days ago
> The result is a language ideal for no one and pushed heavily by Apple.

Does it have to be "ideal" to be worthwhile? I think it fits a similar use-case to something like C# but it's a lot nicer to work with. I don't understand why Swift shouldn't be perfectly usable for data science, or writing server-less functions for example: it would be a perfectly suitable stand-in for Python or Go in these cases, but with a much nicer type system in my opinion thanks to the first-class optional handling.

> Swift as a "compiled python" loses to Go, and that not even Go's design goal (though it is a fairly common use of it).

I totally disagree. Go is a jail. It's optimized for big teams with a lot of turnover, where you want to prevent complexity in the code-base by choosing a language with very limited facilities for abstraction.

Swift on the other hand has a really flexible syntax, which allows you to hide a lot of complexity behind simple interfaces. In that way, it can be a lot more like Python, where the code you're writing is very much at the domain level, and you don't have to think about the implementation details very often. There are many things you can express in swift which are no expressible in go.

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