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Mike Kreuzer

Sometimes carpetbaggers have something to sell

February 19, 2015

Swift 1.2 dropped, and features several big improvements. I've been playing with Swift since day one, and I'm more hopeful about it than ever. I also almost became [gasp] functional programming curious. It passed.

Gone are the optional-checking pyramids of doom.

if let a = foo(), b = bar(), c = baz() {
    doSomething(a,b,c)
}

Doing in one line what was taking an open ended number of nested if/let statements is so much better. And incremental builds, wonderful; I cannot believe we did without for so long.

Some things though are still not quite ready:

All up things Swift-ish are improving at an amazing pace, we're not there yet (where there = programming Nirvana), but it's not even been a year.

The other problems I have have to do with the size & age of the Swift community, at least as much as they have to do with anything Apple's done.

Both of these issues will be solved by the more widespread adoption of the language - competing solutions created & some common ground adopted, & the influence of the functionalistas diluted back to their usual (tiny, tiny, easy to ignore) level. They'll lose interest soon enough when Swift isn't functionally pure enough for them any way.

Map functions are kind of cool. Sometimes. In limited circumstances. (Stop!)

I am glad I leapt onboard on day one. I have enjoyed the ride immensely. There have been a few dark evenings where the annoyances piled up, but never enough for me to doubt my move. Swift is great, if you haven't, you should try it.

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