The rise and fall of Apple's Swift

The reason I like Obj-C is the simplicity. You've got C, the most popular and widely deployed programming language in the world with libraries available for pretty much everything. Then you add a minimal slice of proven Smalltalk constructs on top, completely orthogonal to the base language. There's rarely a question about whether you should be doing something the high-level object-oriented message passing way, or the low-level C "functions & struct pointers" way. The two play together with no surprises (unlike C++ which is a minefield of surprises for the C programmer).

Swift threw away the Smalltalk-like simple dynamism of Objective-C. Instead it gives you syntax that's got more sprawl than Scala; a swamp of type system combinatorial explosions that can rival C++; language instability on par with modern JavaScript; and the coup de grâce is that all this is connected at the hip to a giant framework that doesn't feel Swift-native because it's actually an Objective-C API with decades of baggage.

At the same time, Apple likes to pretend that Swift is a beginner-friendly language. It's a floor wax and a desert topping — and after you've iced the cake with a thick layer of Swift you can apparently both have it and eat it.

Put aside feelings about Javascript and realize that everything is heading towards Javascript for websites, apps, scripts, command line tools, browsers, and etc.

It's hard for Swift to compete, like Go and Rust are for instance, when it's current best use is to make apps for a single platform. They don't have the vast number of libraries and active maintainers Javascript has. That along with Swift itself constantly changing (along the same timeframe Go has maintained it's 1.x guarantee and Javascript has maintained compatibility at all costs) and I've just recently heard that while Swift appears like a more powerful Javascript at first the more complicated features rapidly intermingle in strange ways that the code does not do enough to make clear.

Swift by no means is dead, but it's not the right tool right now for most people. Most have to develop the backend and web app first and then they go to iOS. With React Native many don't even need to know Swift to do the 2nd step.

They are anchoring their argument about the past and future of Swift as a popular programming language based on... how many hits it has on a Google search? Okay.

http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[swift,objective-c,xamarin,cord...

[1] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-defi...