I love Swift but at 4.2, its still a distance from being useable for me.
Swift is suppose to be modern, only to be burden by API compatibility work, which is non trivia.
This significantly slow certain important developments like ABI Stability (5.0), Full Generic (5.0), Concurrency (Maybe 6.0)?
A year since 4.0 release and in the coming few months, 4.2 will be release and not 5.0. This mean the timeline for 6.0 get push even further back.
While Swift is modern in area like optionality, first class immutable struct and (my favourite feature) enum with associated values, it lack many other modern features we come to expect from modern language. e.g. callback are still the way for async path control (1 of the regret of Ryan Dahl in his JSConf EU talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA)
1.0 to 3.0 was spent getting the API right. This is a significant positive investment in the long run, but as someone who have to maintain codes, it was not pleasant at all and I still have code stuck in 1.0/2.0 eras. I have crashes with getting conditional conformance working with generic. Some wasn't crashing on 1.0 or 2.0 but crash on 3.0. Swift clearing is a WIP.
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At the same time, TypeScript happened. TypeScript turn JavaScript into optional typed language. I see JavaScript and Objective-C in similar light. Since Objective-C start getting some syntactic sugar (generic, nullability), I wonder what if they have taken the TypeScript approach instead.
TypeScript have no choice but be pragmatic (probably after seeing how Dart was not adopted by the larger community for going the Swift way).
Apple basically act like a benevolent dictator, whatever direction they take is more or less the future, we have to figure out how to work around the new "world" order, which get updated every year at June.
The best iOS/Mac developer thrive in this environment and get handsomely rewarded (App Store ranking, recognition from Apple), I tried and failed miserably.
Swift is suppose to be modern, only to be burden by API compatibility work, which is non trivia.
This significantly slow certain important developments like ABI Stability (5.0), Full Generic (5.0), Concurrency (Maybe 6.0)?
A year since 4.0 release and in the coming few months, 4.2 will be release and not 5.0. This mean the timeline for 6.0 get push even further back.
While Swift is modern in area like optionality, first class immutable struct and (my favourite feature) enum with associated values, it lack many other modern features we come to expect from modern language. e.g. callback are still the way for async path control (1 of the regret of Ryan Dahl in his JSConf EU talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA)
1.0 to 3.0 was spent getting the API right. This is a significant positive investment in the long run, but as someone who have to maintain codes, it was not pleasant at all and I still have code stuck in 1.0/2.0 eras. I have crashes with getting conditional conformance working with generic. Some wasn't crashing on 1.0 or 2.0 but crash on 3.0. Swift clearing is a WIP.
---
At the same time, TypeScript happened. TypeScript turn JavaScript into optional typed language. I see JavaScript and Objective-C in similar light. Since Objective-C start getting some syntactic sugar (generic, nullability), I wonder what if they have taken the TypeScript approach instead.
TypeScript have no choice but be pragmatic (probably after seeing how Dart was not adopted by the larger community for going the Swift way).
Apple basically act like a benevolent dictator, whatever direction they take is more or less the future, we have to figure out how to work around the new "world" order, which get updated every year at June.
The best iOS/Mac developer thrive in this environment and get handsomely rewarded (App Store ranking, recognition from Apple), I tried and failed miserably.