It sounds to me like you're just asking for a quick and dirty default that's nice and pithy and short. That's fine, but file i/o tends to get messy and easy to exploit without some safeguards, and doing it "right" tends to be a bit more complicated.

Like part of your complaint above is pathing, and even something as short and pithy as Python (at least in my opinion, that's why I keep going to it to write proof of concepts), in order to do file i/o "right", requires knowing about all sorts of other things.

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous post is paths in Python, which has this whole fun page on it in the Python documentation: https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.path.html. Part of the reason for this in the first place is because pathing is handled differently between Unix and Windows systems, so you're supposed to use this library to navigate (or something completely different, glob, which is another thing to look up and understand) instead of just using a open("c:/blah/blah.txt") so that it can be compatible for either OS.

That's not too much different than having to specify a type of directory for Swift, and has the same types of reasons for why it exists, for safety, but it just doesn't let you do something potentially dumb like open('blah.txt') for something quick and dirty, like Python does, which I admit I do abuse if I'm trying to write something quick and dirty myself.

EDIT: This link here shows how you can write a helper function to basically turn the file i/o into a 2-liner, and I'm sure there's ways to make this even simpler: https://www.hackingwithswift.com/example-code/strings/how-to...