[mafalda]

My main takeaway is that Swift is complex and tries to solve many problems. As a result it is going to frustrate almost everyone in one bit or another.

I'm not an expert in the Swift Evolution process but I must praise it in terms of ease of reading. Back when I was invested in learning more about Swift, reading some proposals helped me understand it better. But I believe the Swift team/community will need to define a boundary some time in the future on what must be added or not to the language as its complexity grows. In the long run, even if a proposal makes sense, is implemented and was reviewed, it usually will also add a new thing to the language that implies in a bigger documentation and another way to code/solve a given problem.

In the AnyObject dispatch regret [0], the author wrote "As I’ve mentioned many times (though not so much on this blog), Swift had to be as good as Objective-C at making most Cocoa apps, or people wouldn’t use it no matter how good the new stuff was". My first real contact with Cocoa was while learning Swift and I can imagine all the hard work that was put into it. Then SwiftUI came on together with a bunch of new features to a language that I was still getting used to. After getting frustrated with the lack of documentation (combined with the lack of knowledge about some patterns) and no clear way to solve small problems while studying it, I've decided to dive again into Objective-C to not only grasp most of in one week but also to find that I did not need most of the features Swift delivered.

And this is something that is part of Swift. By design it offers you multiple ways to tackle your problems and by design it is only going to offer you more ways as time passes. I consider this a trait that is bad for the language itself in the long run. Looking back 7 years after the introduction of Swift I guess Apple would be better served if it just kept investing in Objective-C. But who knows what will Swift and its ecosystem look like in 2028.

[0] https://belkadan.com/blog/2021/08/Swift-Regret-AnyObject-Dis...