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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

I don't miss @ and [] all over the place, even if Objective-C has some cool ideas into it.

I do agree Swift's design has gone a bit overbord, we wanted Delphi and got Haskell instead.

However note the same phenomen happening with other languages, as soon as you have a team being paid to develop a language, their job depends on adding features in every single release.

Programming languages are products, even those that praise C's simplicity have certainly not read compiler manuals about language extensions, or the mailings from WG14 proposals.

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> we wanted Delphi and got Haskell instead

Please elaborate.

> However note the same phenomen happening with other languages, as soon as you have a team being paid to develop a language, their job depends on adding features in every single release.

Users also request those features. You said yourself that programming languages are products. In that sense, people are always evaluating them through the lenses of utility (the economics concept), and if they have to pick between two languages, with similar capabilities, they will pick up the one that maximises that utility.

This to weird design decisions getting inserted into the fabric as a consequence (the current state of C++ comes to mind). And given developers are too opinionated about everything, we get politics as a side effect.

> Please elaborate.

Ideally Swift would have been something with compile speed of Delphi, its RAD capabilities, strong typing with a good enough type system to support the transparent migration path from Objective-C, and that was it.

Instead we have quite a few type systems ideas going back and forth, with some hard changes across language versions, as if playing with Haskell type system, and GHC feature flags.

> Users also request those features.

Some users request those features, most of them come from team themselves roadmap, regarding what cool features to add next.

Then as politics get into the game, naturally the process of what features land into the stable implementation, and what fail by the wayside depends pretty much how they get pushed into adoption.

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