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Comment by apple4ever | Hacker News Reader

I was there with you too. Objective-C may have been verbose, but it was readable and easily modifiable.

It definitely seemed like the people who wrote Swift hated Objective-C. The "let", "func", etc syntax is ugly and unnecessary, along with the question marks.

I know I'm swimming against the tide, but I'll be writing Objective-C for as long as I can.

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> along with the question marks

I'd take the question marks any day over tracking a nil passed around a dozen source files before landing in a dictionary literal.

Absolutely this. Having accidental null values floating around a program should not be a thing in the year 2021. And that’s exactly what some languages are fixing, like Swift. This problem is also one of the reasons why I got so frustrated using clojure.

The question mark syntax just moves this burden to some other layer of abstraction.

I disagree. Knowing if something could be nil is a very different thing than something unexpectedly becoming nil. If you have values that are guaranteed by the compiler to never be nil, that removes the burden completely.

> that removes the burden completely.

In practice this gives you improperly constructed objects with bad state, returned from code some random person wrote in a hurry. Yes, it is bad code but so is most code in existence you have to interface with.

I'm by no means an OOP guru, but if anything is passed through a dozen source files, I start to feel a bit queasy.

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