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by tl
2074 days ago
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"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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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.