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Comment by bnchrch | Hacker News Reader

Happy to see Swift progress. Its a beautiful language and well thought out. Would love to see it expand outside of iOS

Beautiful? Just the number of keywords and reserved words and compiler attributes makes it very ugly to me. There are so many ways to do things (and if SwiftUI is involved I can expect a significant subset to... just not work - but I don't think that's the language's fault).

What would you have done differently? All healthy languages need to constantly evolve, you only get to decide where. You can change syntax, add keywords, attributes, etc but it's a tradeoff.

Any attributes or keywords relating to Objective-C or interop are not everyday baggage for most people.

For SwiftUI, attributes seem like as good a choice as anything else.

As a whole concurrency is a mishmash syntactic mess, but I agree with the direction and the result, they're trying to manage the improvements they keep adding over years of investment.

Why click into this thread then? Do you think they will make a Swift 7 with these release notes: - removed 10 keywords cause chairhairair didn't like them - fixed swiftui cause too many users don't know order matters - added another dsl implementation

Oh, are only positive reactions allowed?

The number of keywords in Swift is not an uncommon criticism . Even Chris Lattner is critical of the direction Swift went in after its inception. I'm not sure what you're referring to with "order matters," but SwiftUI's issues go far beyond the order of the modifiers used.

For many people a beautiful language is which looks beautiful, as opposed to one which reads beautifully.

Except for the rules around init

What do you mean?

This[1], I suspect.

https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...

Init can become a hassle. And I'm not the only one, I remember listening (to a podcast?) where Chris Lattner himself remarked that there were many nitty-gritty details to the init phase of objects.

You can use it on macOS, iPadOS, watchOS and tvOS as well. Oh, and visionOS, at least for now.

For now?

I don't know how long visionOS will survive, it seems Apple has scaled down further development of Vision Pro quite substantially. And for something like Meta-style smart glasses, visionOS is probably not a good fit.

Thanks Mr. Steve not Jobs for outsider information.

Always welcome. Just ask if you want to hear more.

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