I am jealous of Swift

Let's see how I can formulate my thoughts about Swift without say something that can be considered trivial.

I think Swift can be basically resumed with this quote:

> Crucially, the vast majority of this is incidental complexity, not essential complexity.

I love Swift, I think is a good language, but is far away from perfection. Sometimes I feel that is half-baked compared to languages like Scala. I can understand the complexity and the obstacles that are part of a development of a new programming language, but some things are really messy.

I truly hate these 3 factors:

> enum cases act like functions, but are not functions.

> Properties act like functions, but are not functions.

> Initializers act like functions, but are not functions.

Plus the fact the language is not homoiconic freaks me out, sometimes.

I like Swift because constantly challenges my skills as engineer, I have to find workarounds to apply all the concepts I know about functional programming, but... this is the current feeling, I don't know if in a long run this would persist, I can't image to fight against the language like I have to do sometimes, would make me still happy in 2-3 years, maybe some day I would get tired.

I like Swift, there's a lot to do to jump from a good language, to an awesome language, but now we are still far away from that.

Yeah, a.k.a pragmatic. It's no Scheme and no Smalltalk.

Golang, which others like, is also a huge pool of "because I say so" and special-cases (make, ranges etc), but its restrictive and simplistic to boot.

At least Swift is firing in all pistons...

    > ... we learn that debug builds are often 100 times slower
    > than optimized builds (which themselves don't really
    > rival C).

    > Sorry, that's not the sign of a language that's 
    > "designed to be fast".