What makes Swift better than other ML like languages for the mainstream developer is the tooling. e.g. Playgrounds and IDE support, and Apple forcing developers to adopt it (Objective-C had only a few WWDC sessions).
For anything else, Haskell, OCaml, Rust and even F# are better options, as they are more mature, already portable and lots of libraries to choose from.
Haskell is really weird. Even for someone reasonably experienced in functional programming, there are tons of new concepts you need to master to be minimally productive in the language. Beyond that, it introduces a whole new problem class of space leaks that you need to reason about. It's not a bad language, but it is a much more radical leap from anything else you're likely to have tried than Swift is.
OCaml is fairly verbose, still doesn't have a great parallelism story AFAIK, and has a quirky type system (1.5 + 1.5 is a type error) and a not-very-well-loved standard library.
Rust can be pretty hard to use and not very ergonomic. If anybody's first Rust stab at a Rust program doesn't run into "such-and-such does not live long enough," that's pretty astonishing. You have to think about a lot more than with Swift.
F# is tied to .NET, which is sufficient to be unappealing for a lot of people.
Mostly agree, but it does depend on how you define minimally productive. I also believe this is more of a pedagogy problem. For instance, someone can tell me what their definition of being minimally productive is in Haskell and if it is within my skills I can get them there pretty quickly.
> Beyond that, it introduces a whole new problem class of space leaks that you need to reason about.
I feel like "whole new problem class" is unfair since other languages have memory leaks.
Also, there are techniques developing for dealing with space leaks just like other languages have techniques for memory leaks:
http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2015/09/detecting-space-lea...
> It's not a bad language, but it is a much more radical leap from anything else you're likely to have tried than Swift is.
Perhaps I've drunk the koolaid, but it doesn't seem that radical after having learned it.
> OCaml is fairly verbose
Agreed, it's the main thing that has put me off of learning what is probably an awesome language. To be honest I just can't get over all the let's :/
I find this a little hypocritical since I found it easy to get over lisps/schemes parenthesis.
> still doesn't have a great parallelism story AFAIK
Right, but they are apparently fixing that fairly quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9582980
To be fair that was posted 146 days ago though and I don't know what current progress is.
> and has a quirky type system (1.5 + 1.5 is a type error)
Interesting, that's because you need to use .+ right?
> and a not-very-well-loved standard library.
I'm always torn on whether or not this is a huge problem. Part of me loves being able to build everything as libraries since anyone can essentially build onto the language. With a good enough package manager this seems ideal. The part of me that wants things to be fast and minimal though craves a great standard library so I can have fewer dependencies and a more "standard" experience. A good standard library also has the advantage of giving you good or good enough options without having to do tons of research on the best libraries for a given task.
Haskell for instance can require some knowledge of the library ecosystem to have the best experience. I'm not sure I'd say the standard library (or Prelude as we call it) is horrible, but it's definitely not as performant as it could be since many (all?) things are based on strings being represented as a linked list. The library solution for this is use Text for anything with unicode or use bytestring for ascii only IIRC.
> Using Rust on iOS is pain.
Swift with Objective-C is bridged automatically.
You don't have this problem with Swift.
To avoid the unnecessary overhead of dynamically dispatched Objective-C method calls.
To me, it seems more sensible to go
Rust -> C -> Swift
Rust -> C -> Objective-C -> SwiftDon't tie your ecosystem to a proprietary (yes, Swift is still a 100% proprietary environment!) toolchain. We've done that several times already in this industry and the results have never been good.