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Comment by binaryapparatus | Hacker News Reader

I really tried couple of times to use swift in production. One of my MAS apps is pure swift. However I can't force myself to like it. Maybe I am missing some brilliant part of it that I missed but I just can't love it.

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I write Swift code every day, and I can't count the number of times thats its type system has saved me, at compile time, from errors that would have otherwise shown up in QA or quite possibly production. In general, Swift makes iOS apps perform more reliably than Objective-C.

There is a quote by Jim Jannard of Red in the documentary Side by Side: "digital wasn't paying enough respect to film". That is the feeling I get when programming Swift. I really wanted an improved Objective-C or at least something that was kept some of the same conventions (selector syntax). F-Script was interesting example of a language, but didn't really have the depth. I just cannot shake the feeling that the creators of Swift looked down on Objective-C like some of the Apple folks in 98ish when they tried to foist Java on us. Its hard to use a language when your pretty sure the the designers hated one of your favorite things.

I'm programming in it daily and its uglier and has more syntax then it should. Its very much like my experience with Transact-SQL, I'll use it and gain as much proficiency as possible, but I really don't like programming in it.

What do you love? I can't love Go as a language, but love the projects, standard library, community, and have no replacement yet for the space where Go is.

I went trough C and Pascal some 30 years ago and still prefer C above anything else. Objective C obviously being close enough so I can write efficient (or at least visually pleasing code). Last straw with Swift for me was banishing of ++ operator. C has beauty and smartness to write _a lot_ of code in one line. I don't like C++ that much.

Anything that makes code beautiful works for me. Swift somehow can't be per_line_efficient and aesthetically pleasing to me.

Sounds like you like what you’re used to. What do you mean by per line efficient? C and Objective C are more verbose. Declaring non-null, implicit types, and immutable in Swift is a big plus.

let x = “Hello world”

var isDone = false

Filtering an array in one line is much nicer than a for loop:

let newList = anArray.filter(...)

No header files reduces code significantly.

For instance tight while loop with ++ increments where needed. You can't do that in Swift. Or one liner if in the middle of other code.

I am using a lot of different languages so 'what I am used to' means lots of different stuff. Ruby has some of C beauty. Python does not. Haskell is probably most beautiful of them all. All individual and from my point of view of course.

Perhaps you can be less abstract and illustrate your point with sample code. In most comparisons, Swift looks a lot nicer.

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/should-i-use-objecti...

The ++ operator was removed from Swift. Haskell uses ++ for concatenation. The case where ++ to add 1 is desirable occurs much less often than a variable declaration, which is better in Swift.

For instance C copy routine:

  while (*d++ = *s++);

Or sort in Haskell:

  qsort []     = []
  qsort (x:xs) = qsort (filter (< x) xs) ++ [x] ++ qsort (filter (>= x) xs)

Haskell is beautiful, but it's worth mentioning out that Haskell's quicksort is not written that way, because in this case beautiful means incredibly slow (and also because that's not even quicksort, which is an algorithm defined by how it modifies data in-place). The real quicksort implementation uses mutable arrays to perform an in-place sort, and isn't beautiful at all.

C-style strcpy in Swift is a little verbose:

  func strcpySwift(_ d:UnsafeMutablePointer<CChar>,
                   _ s:UnsafeMutablePointer<CChar>) {
    for i in 0... {
      d[i] = s[i]
      if s[i] == 0 {
        return
      }
    }
  }

Haskell-style sort in Swift is pretty nice:

  func qsort<T:Comparable>(_ arr:[T]) -> [T] {
    var xs = arr[...]
    guard let x = xs.popFirst() else {
      return []
    }
    return (qsort(xs.filter{$0 <= x})) + [x] +
           (qsort(xs.filter{$0 > x}))
  }

What’s the value of the Haskell code? It’s a great language but not really supported on iOS. Would love for it to be.

Back to the one idiomatic C example. The few places where it’s terse does not make up for the many other places where it’s not. You also have memory management with malloc for additional code. If you compare nontrivial code, Swift is a more modern, safer, less verbose, etc way to develop iOS apps vs Objective C.

Swift wants to be much more than just iOS specific language so it is fair to compare its pros and cons with other general purpose languages. If you look at iOS only then there is not much to compare to, just ObjC and few JS abominations. Staying iOS specific is not what Swift wants to be.

Yeah, some are very superficial still they bother me every time. A map in lisp/python/js vs a for-loop in Go/C, for simple transformations.

You can do a filter method in Obj-C with blocks, or even plain C with function pointers.

Something like this?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9558335/filter-an-nsarra...

Food food1 = [Food alloc]initWithName:@"samsar" andId:@"1"];

Food food2 = [Food alloc] initWithName:@"rusaramar" andId:@"2"];

NSSarray array = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:food1, food2, nil];

[array filterUsingPredicate:[NSPredicate predicateWithBlock:^BOOL(id evaluatedObject, NSDictionary bindings) {

    return [evaluatedObject.foodName hasPrefix:searchBar.text];

}];

I haven't used it since the early days, and at the time it seemed obtuse and was also missing a lot of really basic features. I might pick it up again and see how it has changed.

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