Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

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> - Modern Ergonomics

What does this even mean? Modern Swift looks like a haphazard mishmash of conflicting features where every problem is solved by "just one more keyword bro". In 2024 it had 217 keywords: https://x.com/jacobtechtavern/status/1841251621004538183 and that was reduced slightly, to 203, in 2025: https://x.com/jacobtechtavern/status/1962242782405267617

According to Lattner they never even had the time to design anything due to time pressure from Apple [1]. So Swift ended up with a type system that the compiler can't even check and is impossible to fix. So the compiler routinely just gives up and complains on even the most trivial code.

[1] https://youtu.be/ovYbgbrQ-v8?si=tAko6n88PmpWrzvO&t=1400

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Swift has turned into a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff...

We had a ton of users, it had a ton of iternal technical debt... the whole team was behind, and instead of fixing the core, what the team did is they started adding all these special cases.

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It’s not necessary to use all or even most of those features, though, and so a nice balance of expressiveness and functionality is possible. I’ll take it over dying on weird hills in language design in pursuit of ideological purity or mountains of ceremonial code and unavoidably ugly syntax.

> mountains of ceremonial code and unavoidably ugly syntax.

you... just described Swift, really :)

Also, all those features exist even if you don't use them all. Which makes the language complex, cumbersome, and makes its compiler slow, complex and brittle. A language shouldn't be a collection of one-off edge cases, and this has nothing to do with ideological purity

I dunno, with a handful of exceptions I'm still mostly writing Swift the same way I did 5+ years ago. Unless you're using SwiftUI, new features haven't changed a whole lot in real world use.

Whatever the case, I don't enjoy writing languages more obsessed with theory or design purity (like Kotlin) as much.

I agree the language itself has gotten more complex, but for day-to-day productivity in terms of actually using it to write code, I don't think it makes a difference.

I've found writing Swift code very pleasant, but I've been doing it for ten years, so that helps I suppose. The biggest productivity impact for day-to-day use for me in the last few years has been the new concurrency model.

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