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Comment by rcruzeiro | Hacker News Reader

> Swift’s goals are great, I like the syntax, but the language implementation seems to just special case everything rather than having coherent language design.

This could not be furthest for the truth. The entire process of proposing a new language feature to getting it implemented and shipped is out in the open for everyone to participate/see.

https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution

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What’s that got to do with coherent language design? Just because it’s somewhat open doesn’t mean it has consistent design. Then by all accounts Apple just forced through language changes needed for SwiftUI.

I agree that that is the one counter example for the above. Apple forcing the closure syntax to better cater to SwiftUI left a sour taste in the mouths of an entire community.

Too many cooks!

And no Steve Jobs to pull them down to earth.

Steve Jobs, of course, was always involved in the details of programming languages targeting his platform.

He would probably raise hell about the state of the new macOS Setting window though. How this thing made it through QA remains a mystery.

I wasn't there so I can't say for sure.

But my impression watching from the outside is that he had a finger in every pie.

He really was involved. As I understand it Obj-C was championed by him. NextSTEP was largely software related:

https://youtu.be/Hu-jvAWTZ9o?si=PalSP6POofiRuj3a

I still feel like GUI programming hasn’t progressed in the years since this. Actually they’ve regressed in many ways.

Conversely, Dart does the exact same thing and is probably the best designed language I’ve ever come across

Best designed? Really? Support for something as basic as consistent integer types across platforms is non-existent.

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