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Comment by sneakymichael | Hacker News Reader

Oof, hard disagree. I absolutely hated writing Objective-C for years– I felt like I had to write unnecessary 'glue' with header files, handling of 'nil' was always jarring, and square brackets at the start and end of every call felt horrendous, to me at least.

I relished the day Swift was announced, and have been using it ever since.

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Agree -- my experience with Swift is that it's far more readable and closer to my personal aesthetics than Obj-C, but I actually struggled a lot figuring out how to write things the way that felt intuitive to me (ex. maintaining an observable global state + config that you can access from anywhere, easy declaration of and access to arbitrary/deeply-nested associative array keys, JSON handling, declare-once-use-anywhere icons and colors, that kind of stuff).

Once I had all the convenience guts in place, writing actual functionality has been a delight though (outside of the overly-verbose let/guard and type casting)

That said, I'm pretty sure I'm also probably just hard headed and doing it wrong, and could've learned the accepted patterns/methodologies lol

I always thought the square brackets were clever. Like wrapping a letter in an envelope – which is a great metaphor for the message sending the syntax denotes.

> I felt like I had to write unnecessary 'glue' with header files

Headers are a feature, not a bug. They're the API. They help document the API and also keep it separate from the implementation.

Objective-C programmers say this, but I note that I've never once heard a Swift developer complain that it's too hard to discover API interface or keep things non-`public`.

Only access control I wish Swift had is typeprivate so I could hide private things but make them available for subclasses (or perhaps protocol conformers). Unfortunately Apple has only added a package level so far, which seems fairly useless (you're either too big for it to be useful or too small to need it). Obj-C didn't really have ACLs at all, you just hid stuff in interfaces. Once found, those interfaces were no protection at all.

> never once heard a Swift developer complain that it's too hard to discover API interface

Xcode presents the equivalent of a “header” when you follow a symbol to a framework you don’t have the source for… it’s a swift file full of definitions only and no implementations. The compiler emits this for you automatically as a .swiftinterface file

> or keep things non-`public`

I definitely am a swift developer that would complain about this. It’s way too easy to be cavalier about using the “public” keyword and making things part of the public API when they probably shouldn’t be. It’s like engineers have muscle memory from Java and just type “public class” without really questioning why first.

> The compiler emits this for you automatically as a .swiftinterface file

It's so incredibly slow, though, which is frustrating. It would be ok if only this were as instantaneous as checking a header file.

Ironically, almost everything about "Swift" is slower than Objective-C.

Everyone's brain is probably different, but when I first started writing swift I definitely missed header files. When I switch back from a c project I miss them again.

IDEs have improved so integration of Swift and searching is easy. Objective-C now could do without headers but I used it 25 years ago and having headers made life easier.

In my current and previous job, we talked about (and partially implemented) low level “contract” modules in order to avoid linking (and building) the entire module in order to share behaviour

That problem was already solved with header files; trivial to split interface from implementation, they’re just two different files. But sometime around the 90s, probably Java and this was deemed inconvenient. Now we’re trying to reinvent that same pattern

Any time a language forces you to create boilerplate that could be autogenerated by your toolchain, it's not a feature.

You don’t need “the API” in another file.

Headers are such an idiotic design, over-abstraction harms locality of reasoning.

They made a TON of sense when memory was very limited.

Why parse out a whole C file when you can get the only bits that matter for compiling your file from a 30 line header?

Except languages with modules already existed, in systems even more constrained memory predating C's invention.

Swift allows you to program using “headers” - just have a protocol and an implementation, even in separate files if you want.

This is a good pattern for some cases, like the public members of a package. However, I love that I don’t need to do this for every class I write.

And if you do use this approach, at least swift will emit a compile error if your protocol and implementation signatures don’t match.

ObjC will happily compile if your header is missing an implementation and crash at runtime.

TypeScript is no headache for me and has no header files.

I love the square brackets. I find them aesthetically pleasing for some reason.

With Xcode or any modern IDE the autocomplete "snap" of square brackets closing is a very satisfying code feel.

I find modern Swift to be increasingly ugly and difficult to read. Reading classic Objective-C code is refreshing.

In the whole I don’t mind Objective-C, but when I have to write it these days I definitely get annoyed by having to navigate and maintain header files. It’s more extra overhead than one might realize.

My other complaint with it compared to Swift is how one needs to pull in a bunch of utility libraries to do many things that come stock with Swift.

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