“Swift is the only language I could find with over 100 keywords” | Hacker News Reader

“Swift is the only language I could find with over 100 keywords”

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29 pointsalexobenauer24 comments

I don't think this is fair to Swift. Swift seems to have taken a view that the langauge will force you to be explicit about what you want. For example, the "indirect" keyword. Early Swift did not let you have recursive enums, apparently this can be something of a performance killer I guess was the reasoning. However they are really useful, so Swift added them. However rather than just automatically using an indirect Enum which is easily detectible, Swift forces you to use the "indirect" keyword. Rather than implicitly doing work for you, the Swift compiler stops to ask "are you sure this is what you really want to do? Do you understand the tradeoffs you are making?"

Personally I'm a fan of the Swift approach even if it does balloon the keyword count a bit.

I feel it's better to add keywords like that than to over load keywords based on context. See the keyword const in C/C++.

Also better to trust the end used to decide what trade offs they want to make. For instance code that converts a user click to a database query, clean and understandable is more important than performance. If it takes 10ns or 10ms the user ain't going to know the difference.

Depending on how you count keywords, SQL has over 400. See https://github.com/ballista-compute/sqlparser-rs/blob/main/s... .

SQLite has 147 keywords - https://www.sqlite.org/lang_keywords.html .

COBOL has over 300 too

I count 417 reserved words at https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/iis/9.1?topic=words-cobol-reserv... .

I see there's "ZERO", "ZEROES", and "ZEROS" - I didn't realize that both plurals are acceptable in English! - https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3824/what-is-the... .

My favorite reserved word on that list is "KANJI". From https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/4.2?topic=expressions-... :

> The class condition determines whether the content of a data item is alphabetic, alphabetic-lower, alphabetic-upper, numeric, DBCS, KANJI, or contains only the characters in the set of characters specified by the CLASS clause as defined in the SPECIAL-NAMES paragraph of the environment division.

VB6 has close to 300

And while some vb6 code is truly terrible, it isn't because of keywords. It's because beginners have no idea what they are doing.

So I imagine Swift code may be terrible because there are a lot of noobs out there doing whatever it takes to ship.

And yet code in Swift is much cleaner than anything in Javascript. I say that having mostly written Swift & Javascript at my jobs and on the side.

JS is a fairly low bar to compare other programming languages to.

And used by many, so useful to compare to?

It’s only used by many because it’s the only scripting language on the web browser, and not due to anything intrinsic to the language.

So it’s popularity tells us nothing about the language, and more about the fact that it’s the only language on the most popular platform.

So I’m not sure comparing any language to JS is useful to learn about the language.

It’s popularity tells us many people will be able to relate to that comparison.

It's less useful when you realize that almost every other widely used programming language is better than JavaScript.

The point was to compare a "simpler" language

Yeah, the design by committee approach of Swift isn't helping either. There are some weird language decisions being made

56 keywords in OCaml, 99 total if you count the character sequences. Maybe a better metric would be "keywords uses regularly"?. https://ocaml.org/manual/lex.html#sss:keywords

Smalltalk80 wins with only 6 keywords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1420950032669286402.html

I don't see golang on that chart. It must be close to C (on the lower end).

I'm pretty sure Common Lisp has well over 100 keywords.

Can you give some examples? IIUC there are builtins (macros/functions that couldn't be expressed in the language) but no keywords. There are lots of syntax elements that could be keywords like ' (quoting) but I am not aware of any true keywords.

All special forms (if, let, progv, etc...) are very similar to keywords in other languages. But there's only a couple dozen of them.

From Wikipedia: "Some Lisp control structures are special operators, equivalent to other languages' syntactic keywords."

Personally I don't think that really counts. IIUC you can override those names, so they aren't reserved, and you can implement any one of these as a macro so you don't need to remember anything outside of the core language.

(You can't implement them all as macros, but IIRC there are disjoint built-in sets that can give you the full behaviour)

Sure. I think the point he was trying to make is that some languages are more complex than others. And in that context, the fact that Lisp has the flexibility to override just about anything actually makes the language more complex. Because now you can't make any assumptions about anything. In some ways Lisp is the most complex language in existence because it encompasses an infinite number of sub languages (ergo Racket's tagline "The programmable programming language"). In other ways it's the most simple language ever.

SystemVerilog (IEEE 1800-2017) has 248.

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