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Comment by sgjohnson | Hacker News Reader

> Swift implosion

What's wrong with Swift? It's a replacement for Objective-C, that nobody besides macOS/iOS devs used anyway, therefore it's no big deal if nobody uses it outside of macOS/iOS development, as it's not a regression

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Very few people are using it at all, outside of calling OSX/iOS APIs. They're using it to weld platform support into a C++ codebase, same way they'd use ObjC for that (instead of writing entire apps in it).

The number of pure-Swift projects I've seen per tempus is far less than pure-ObjC, which I think is the best measurement to comprehend Swift uptake. Nobody wanted an ObjC replacement, Apple misread the room.

Do you have statistics? I’m an iOS/macOS dev. Everyone I know is using Swift. I think it would be a bad idea to start a new project in ObjC.

I spent half of my iOS experience of a decade in ObjC and the last half in Swift. I also used ObjC way back when it was in NeXT. No comparison, you'd have to have your head examined to start something in ObjC today. The only reason to do it is maintain an old codebase; in my last job we replaced a huge ObjC codebase (written before I got there) entirely in Swift with higher quality and no issues (reason why was not just to convert it, it was part of a large new invasive project that was canceled but we shipped the Swift rewrite anyway).

This is a horribly misguided take. According to the latest S/O Developer Survey [1], Swift is used by 4.91% of respondents, while Objective-C is only used by 2.39%. Additionally, Swift is loved, and wanted by 62.88% and 4.3% of respondents, respectively. Objective-C is no where close by comparison...

[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popula...

Swift isn't bad, and I actually enjoyed using it. What I didn't enjoy was XCode, which is a shame because they're basically inseparable.

I love Swift. And Xcode 14 is great! What don't you like about it?

The only people I've seen claim Xcode is great have never used virtually any other modern IDE, which basically all run on your hardware/OS of choice. But the IDE isn't the worst of it, the command line tooling is woeful. That the same company could come up with a great language but provide so little incentive for anyone to use it baffles me.

This might be difficult to communicate, but I feel like XCode has me spending way more time and clicks on window/pane management than other IDEs. Apple's design philosophy is to keep things minimalist and hide controls which are not in active use. This means I find myself going back to click on small buttons in order to bring up a pane that will finally allow me to just to click on one icon I need to perform some task. Whereas in other IDEs can I force an icon to stay visible and spend much less time traversing the application's UI.

For an analogy, imagine using a workbench and being forced to put each tool back into it's respective drawer once I am done using it - even though I will certainly need to use the tool again very soon. Whereas other IDEs let my workbench be as customized and cluttered as I want it to be.

I'm not sure that's a great take. Swift's support for Linux is reputed to be bad (not sure what the actual case is) and I think that really hinders adoption. It's a nice language that is very expressive. I would use it for small projects over rust as it has a large standard library if not for the cross-platform difficulties.

It became a kitchen sink language similarly to C++. For all the hate Java gets, they did tackle language development very well - wait a bit for other, niche languages to be your testing ground of new features, and only add what sticks. Swift literally has all the features you can find in today’s modern languages, and they have some inconsistent interactions with each other. Also, even this litany of features isn’t enough to make SwiftUI implementable only as a Swift library, it uses some specifics not available in the language otherwise.

And also, as most apple dev tools, it is the only modern language whose compiler failed under me (other than being slow as hell) - I have never gotten a type inference timed out error in other languages, even though it has been around for a time :D

As for growing a language, this is a must watch (bear with the presenter for the bit, you will soon understand why he talks strangely in the beginning): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0

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