I’ll second Erica on wanting a place to discuss the API guidelines. In general, I like their general approach and philosophy — very much so! — but I also have concerns about some of the details. For example, I totally agree with Erica’s suggestion that all methods with side effects should be verbs, not just ones that mutate the receiver.
You can read here a detailed writeup on the sticking points I hit trying to put the guidelines into practice on a real-world project: https://gist.github.com/pcantrell/22a6564ca7d22789315b <https://gist.github.com/pcantrell/22a6564ca7d22789315b> The acceptance rate for Apple-guideline-recommended changes come out at only about 50%. I realize that guidelines are just guidelines, but that seems like a bit of an easy out if the guidelines doc is meant to help unify the style of disparate Swift libraries. Cheers, Paul > On Jan 5, 2016, at 2:44 PM, Erica Sadun via swift-evolution > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Are API Design Guideline improvement discussions in scope for the Swift > Evolution list and if not, where would they go? > > For example, the current Swift API Design Guidelines follow these rules more > or less. > Use imperative verb phrases for mutating methods: x.reverse(), x.sort(), > x.tweak() > Use noun phrases for non-mutating methods: x.distanceTo(...), idx.successor() > Seems to me the rules should actually be along the lines of: > Use verb phrases to declare procedural methods, whether or not they mutate an > instance or just produce side effects: x.reverse(), x.sort(), x.tweak(), > x.perform(), x.dispatch(), x.send() > Use noun phrases to describe values returned by a functional method: > x.distanceTo(y), index.successor() (This admittedly leaves further issues > around other functional methods, for example, seq.separatedBySequence(seq) > and int.strideTo(other: Self, step:Self.Stride), etc. ) > Are enhancements for API Design Guidelines an area for community involvement? > Where would you start a discussion about the rules? Would modifications > involve formal proposals? > > _______________________________________________ > swift-evolution mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
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