Comment by choxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by choxi | Hacker News Reader

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Swift feels like a Frankenstein language though, there are so many keywords and new ones get added in every update. This article here [1] stack ranked a few languages by number of keywords and Swift is #4 on the list. And in Swift 2.1 they added some more, like properties wrappers and the `some` keyword. It gets hard to keep track of them all and the special behavior each one implies.

On the other hand, you can kind of make your own language within Swift because most of the keywords aren't required but allow some additive features. For example, some features help you write your code functionally and others support a declaritive style. It reminds me of what's going on with Babel and JavaScript, where babel extensions are like these language plugins you can mix and match to create your own language.

If you think of metaprogramming as a way to build your own language within a language, lisps and Ruby were kind of like pioneers of a build-your-own-language trend. I could see that as an interesting direction, I wonder if people have tried it before.

[1] https://medium.com/the-traveled-ios-developers-guide/swift-k...

The thing that makes this work in Swift is the concept of Progressive Disclosure. One of the main tenants of the language is that it should be possible to be productive with a small, high-level subset of the language, and then you can gradually start to utilize the more powerful and obscure parts of the language as you find needs for them

> you can kind of make your own language within Swift

This is one of my favorite aspects of working with Swift. Because it's a relatively un-opinionated language with a diverse toolkit, and because of the powerful type/protocol system, it can really feel like you can carve out a DSL for each specific use-case.

> The thing that makes this work in Swift is the concept of Progressive Disclosure. One of the main tenants of the language is that it should be possible to be productive with a small, high-level subset of the language

"Progressive Disclosure" is an interesting idea for PL research, but IME Swift doesn't do a very good job at it. There's a million cases I've seen where people trying to do simple things run into a pandora's box of complexity (e.g., the infamous "Protocol 'P' can only be used as a generic constraint because it has Self or associated type requirements"). There isn't really a "small subset" I've found that's usable for anything but the absolute simplest programs. Even the fundamental types like Int and String have a lot of not-entirely-hidden complexity in Swift.

> Because it's a relatively un-opinionated language

It seems awfully opinionated to me. There is a clear preferred way to write almost anything. Ask online about how to do things differently, and you'll be told to do it in a more "swifty" way.

> because of the powerful type/protocol system, it can really feel like you can carve out a DSL for each specific use-case

I'll have to see if the new features in the latest versions of Swift (used for SwiftUI) enable this more readily, but as of 4.2, anyway, writing DSLs in Swift is moderately limited and painful.

> Swift feels like a Frankenstein language though, there are so many keywords

That's a big reason why I don't like it. I also can't stand func, let, and var. Because func and var are totally useless, and let is the wrong word (should be const at least).

There is also all the question marks and other confusing syntax.

let is the right word given the historical background of functional programming languages.

nit, only mentioning it because I'm super curious about that list: searching for "4" and "rank" in the article doesn't show any relevant results to the ranking

ah sorry I pasted the wrong link, here it is: https://medium.com/@richardeng/how-to-measure-programming-la...

More accurately, it's tied for third place with C++.

That doesn’t mention PL/I, so it’s the competition for amateurs. https://www.cs.vu.nl/grammarware/browsable/os-pli-v2r3/:

    Summary
    Number of keywords: 310

PL/I made life ‘easier’ by not making keywords reserved, allowing you to use variable names that match the strings used to identify keywords, though, so you didn’t have to learn them all.

They’re certainly wrong about Scheme. They used MIT-Scheme to count keywords, when they should’ve used R5RS Scheme or newer. R5RS has 20 keywords + 4 if you add support for macros. With define-syntax you can define many special forms such as let, let* etc in a smaller language so may be the actual number is much smaller!

They don't say what version of Swift they're counting, but I count 96 keywords on the documentation page they link to, which would move it above C++ into 3rd place.

oh wow, smalltalk has only 6 keywords. that's really... small :).

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