inessential by Brent Simmons

Wil, Chris, Waffle, Samuel, Soroush

Wil Shipley:

So Cocoa programmers are in a tizzy A TIZZY I SAY at the prospect of going back to the bad old days (eg, 1987).

And…

I urge anyone who’s speculating about Swift’s possible future missteps to look hard at the team that’s brought us LLVM, clang, ARC, and Swift, and think, “it’s pretty likely they’ll handle this,” not, “OH GOD EVERYTHING I LOVE IS ENDING.” (The latter of which, incidentally, is my nightly mantra.)

The tizzy is part of the process. I like to think that the various blog posts and Twitter discussions are contributions to a discussion rather than just words expended for no reason. It’s not venting or declaring that the sky for sure will fall — it’s people doing their part to think and communicate about tools that are important to them.

Also: 1987? For Wil, 1987 may have been the last of the bad old days. For other people, 1997 is more likely — but for me it was 2002, and for other people the bad old days are even more recent.

Consider Elm. People have talked it up to me, and it looks pretty cool, and I’m sure it’s awesome in a bunch of ways, and there are probably a bunch of things to learn from it.

But look at this small example of handling button presses. There are two buttons, and there’s a case (switch) statement to handle the message.

In a small example like this it doesn’t seem onerous. But an app is a much bigger thing, and doing this kind of thing everywhere would work me into a tizzy.

* * *

Chris Eidhof:

Yet, techniques you don’t know will almost always seem more complicated at first. I tried arguing with a Haskell programmer that runtime programming can be useful. I tried arguing with a Ruby programmer that static types can be helpful. To both, it seemed unnecessary and complicated. They’ve been writing great code without those features.

* * *

Waffle:

What I also expect is there to be a dialogue right now about these kinds of details by people who know what they’re talking about, about how Swift could actually become more dynamic without copying the flaws of its progenitors and without selling out the feel, mechanics and (most of the) performance of the language.

* * *

Samuel Ford:

My experience working with type strict frameworks is that they are fussy. It’s like if the only way you could chop things when cooking is with an array of specialty chopping tools that have to be assembled from pieces every time you needed them. And you have one for garlic, another for potatoes, and so on.

Every time you start to cook, you’ll feel the weight of taking those tools out, assembling the pieces, then taking them back apart, washing them, and putting them away. What you’ll find over time is that the recipes themselves will adapt to require fewer chopping tools and will become more plain and more similar over time.

* * *

Soroush Khanlou:

Primarily, the big thing I got wrong last year was that Swift is just plain fun. This weekend, I had the pleasure of helping a friend with code-review. His project is completely in Objective-C, and our code review session reminded me how rough the rough edges of that language are, especially after spending any time in Swift.