Abrahams on the Design of Swift

Swift is an incredibly appealing language on so many fronts. It has an expressive and fairly robust type system, an excellent suite of built-in libraries, and moreso than many other languages I've used cares deeply about syntactical ergonomics (i.e. how a language construct or interface feels and reads to use).

It's so unfortunate that its tied up in the Apple ecosystem, then. Not that they don't care about it (they clearly do) but by being an Apple project first-and-foremost, it has virtually no community control—practically no community to speak of—and is unlikely to ever have real, first-class support for use-cases that Apple doesn't use it for, e.g. web apps/APIs or CLIs (where it's the most appealing, imo). This has some benefits, like adding features to the language when Apple-created designs are hard (e.g. SwiftUI), but it's overall a net negative.

Contrast this state with Rust, which has by far the best community I've encountered, and cares deeply about developer experience. Or compare it to JS, which has a clear, formal, and well-documented process for adding features to the language. If Swift were a truly open project, I'd have a hard time finding many things to dislike about it.

> One is left wondering how well he understood the needs of the developers who would be using the Swift language and library, though he says others on the Swift team had experience writing apps.

Maybe a couple of years ago I read someone commenting on the /r/ObjectiveC subreddit that his problem with Swift was that it was pretty clearly not written by someone who was an application developer, and who had the needs of an application developer at heart. Rather, the language was written by a compiler guy, and for the compiler. It's interesting to see another opinion more or less in line with that one.

I was an iOS developer for 5 years. I've since bailed. I'll still do it as a hobby, and wish I could get back into it; but Swift just rubs me the wrong way. I never quite understood the antipathy some people have towards Objective-C. Is it the brackets? Boo-hoo.

Swift, to me, is such an elegant language to write in. I do mostly Java by trade, so I’m spoiled by such a huge ecosystem of open source libraries to pull in. If Swift can develop a comparable ecosystem it would really gain adoption.