Hi there From the perspective from many active programmers that use Swift (not objective C anymore) I am not very happy by having to change program source all the time: Therefore after Swift 3.0 is released I’d recommend kindly:
Freeze Swift For Some Time! Do Not Change AnyThing For At Least 2 Years. (Yes you’ve read that correctly: two years.) Still there? OK, read on: In the mean time, you’ll have the great opportunity to fine-tune compiler and run time systems, to eliminate the few bugs there and make it blazingly fast! In two (or more) years, there are enough Real Users (programmers) that by then will have enough practical experience with Swift, which might play a more solid role in improving Swift, and of course, are extremely happy with Swift, and that it is not changed all the time, So that they can concentrate on writing cool, reliable and decent programs, instead of revising it all the time! After such time, and much more intensive and practical usage, it becomes clear, what is good in Swift and what is not. What happens now, for instance, is that some base their “statistics” of which language elements etc. are frequently used or not, merely upon scanning a codebase of the relatively few (compared with e.g. ObjC, Java or C#) programmers that use Swift now Imho, Swift has not yet been in use long enough. It needs a prolonged time because now, most users have relatively little experience using Swift, thus the way they program now is not really representative with what one really can do with this powerful language, compared to experienced (years, not months) programmers in other languages. Still a lot has to be discovered, has to settle and form good mental pictures in programmer’s minds. It is all going a bit too fast, I think. Please (if you did’t already) realize that already many source code all over the world is written in Swift therefore it is very, very important that backwards compatibility should be preserved as much as possible. because backwards-breaking-changes are a disaster to companies/individuals that have already hundreds or thousands of programs written in Swift. For comparison, until recently I did also programming projects on IBM mainframes for banks, insurance companies etc. The systems they use consists (per company) of literally thousands of Cobol and/or PL/1 programs written in all the years from ca 1970 until now. Still, one can take a program written in 1970 which compiles and runs flawlessly without any modification! All is backward compatible. If you would break backward compatibility in this domain you would probably be kicked of the planet.. But even if we remain in macOS or iOS development, a huge amount of source code has been written in Objective C. Everyone would scream hell if you took out or change language elements.. So please don’t. (it’s unnecessary) When Swift arrived, to me, it had already everything I need, not really missing anything. Of course, a programming language -like all things in life- is never perfect. To me it was also perfectly OK that Swift wasn’t open source, because those that have made Swift did a very good job. So one could even start thinking, why open source Swift? Why not leave it to Apple? But I guess I won’t make many friends asking this.. And I also realize that many good ideas comes from open source. To me, Swift 2.2 and also 3.0 is fine. so, after that: you don’t have to change a thing. it works and has everything I need and is fast and stable. stop removing things. thanks. Kind Regards from beautiful Speyer.de in Germany TedvG _______________________________________________ swift-evolution mailing list [email protected] https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
