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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

I write in Swift.

Swift is six years old.

The difference is that Apple, the most valuable corporation on Earth, has backed it 100%. They do occasionally kill initiatives (Can you say “OpenDoc”? I knew you could!), but not at the 50% rate that Google does, so I knew it wasn’t a big risk.

Also, I really enjoy the language.

It’s a long-term investment, and I don’t expect it to really start paying any dividends for at least another couple of years. I would be fine, sticking with ObjC, which I know will still be around for at least another decade.

But I’m at the point in life, where I want to work with tech that I enjoy.

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Are you using Swift on the server, or just for iOS/Mac apps? I like Swift but it seems the consensus is that's nowhere near ready for server-side stuff. I'm leaning towards Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView for a project I have in mind, largely because I'm a (very) amateur developer and Elixir's way of doing things clicks with the way I think more than Node, which is the only other language I'm basically competent with. Plus, I guess with BEAM, the Erlang underpinnings, and Ecto's excellent PostGreSQL support, Elixir counts as "boring", well-tested technology.

I wouldn’t dream of using it on the server. It will always be a “second-class citizen” on the server. I use good ol’ PHP for my backend. If backend was my bread-and-butter, I might consider Rust or Python (both newer than 20 years, but also mature and well-supported). Maybe even C, if it was critical.

It is, however, an almost ideal GUI application language, and I write native apos.

Time flies. Python is almost 30 years old now.

You’re right! It’s older than PHP.

I had assumed it was half that age.

So...is it “boring” tech? It seems that it really just came into its own in the last ten years.

TBH, I have never gotten interested in Python, but do appreciate its role in many modern technologies.

Rust, on the other hand, has done quite well, quite quickly.

A similar argument applies for Kotlin.

JetBrains as a massive user of Java has a vested interest in making sure Kotlin is pleasant to use (and it's first party nature on Android helps here as well) and interops really really well with existing Java code (since that is their own use case).

I don't really see Kotlin ever being anything other than a niche language for Android development. And even it's position there is dubious.

Cutting the nr of LOC in half, while at the same time getting even more type safety, seems like a pretty big win for any Java project, Android or not.

May I ask why? Is it because Kotlin doesn't bring much new to the table besides fixing a few minor annoyances with Java? I have the same feeling, but can't put my finger on why exactly Kotlin seems unnecessary, except that it's a modern language that doesn't have union types.

My problem with swift is that it's moving faster than most people are comfortable with. Documentation is bare on the newer versions, every example on stack overflow is probably out of date, and it's really frustrating when trying to get things done. Oh and did I mention xcode?

Xcode is a bug farm, but that was the case, long before Swift.

Its bugs aren't "showstoppers," though. Really just annoyances. The biggest issue that I have with it, is that it is huge, and takes forever to download and install.

Swift documentation is pretty sparse, but a fairly robust "tribal knowledge" base is developing. StackOverflow is not bad. Most answers I see have at least "Swift 3" variants, which is really the line of demarcation. It usually takes me thirty seconds to tweak for language changes. Xcode is fairly helpful, there.

A lot of the "moving targets" in Swift are the system framework SDKs and APIs. The language is morphing, but mostly in less-frequented corners.

Yeah, Swift is great. Also enjoy using it. There are problems, but it is getting better. For example, now with Swift 5.3, you can have packages with resources. In particular this means you can easily (well, if you stitch together various blog/stackoverflow posts) bundle Metal shaders with your packages now, which is a huge win for the work that I am doing.

> But I’m at the point in life, where I want to work with tech that I enjoy.

Exactly. When people say "You should work on boring tech." my thought is "Mmkay, sure thing buddy, you do you."

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