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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

They could have at least kept the clean messaging syntax of the Objective-C (Smalltalk). The hybrid they chose was just painful. Plus, what is this fascination with the comma. Adding commas has been a pain when trying Swift as I am constantly skipping them.

They could have cleaned up all Objective-C and built a much nicer language, instead we get a improved Java / C++.

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What commas are you talking about?

  somePoint.moveBy(x: 2.0, y: 3.0)

as opposed to

  [somePoint moveByX: 2.0 y: 3.0];

most Objective-C code would get rid of the space too

  [somePoint moveByX:2.0 y:3.0];

Its just painful to type extra characters that don't do anything and don't help readability. Plus the weird splitting of the moveByX is still odd.

I still am mystified why they didn't just start with:

  somePoint.(moveByX: 2.0 y: 3.0)

to keep it inline with Objective-C and start working on giving the method names an overhaul that would benefit everyone including the Objective-C programmers.

The ones in between the arguments. The beauty of sending a message to an object has been replaced with a function call with a horrible syntax. I guess that's what makes Swift a modern language.

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