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I get a real cognitive dissonance when I see threads of Obj-C fans complaining about how complex and confusing Swift is. I used and loved Objective-C for most of a decade, but I just can't reconcile the rose-tinted views of it with my own experience.
Swift is certainly not perfect, but it has freed me from a bunch of pain I suffered when trying to write esoteric things like graphics, games or parsers in Obj-C (mostly around trying to find the balance between fast-but-primitive C and slow-but-elegant Obj-C APIs)
Swift is certainly a lot more complex than Obj-C in terms of keywords and concepts, but I rarely encounter that complexity in typical use.
And in *atypical* use cases, Obj-C was also immensely complex and weird and hard to use correctly. Did you ever try playing with runtime.h?
And in *atypical* use cases, Obj-C was also immensely complex and weird and hard to use correctly. Did you ever try playing with runtime.h?
95% of Swift code is just simple structs, classes, protocols and enums. I rarely use generics, and I *never* use PATs (apart from stdlib types).
Sure, the new @dynamicWhatever stuff is all crazypants, but you'll rarely ever touch it. These are not barriers to entry.
Sure, the new @dynamicWhatever stuff is all crazypants, but you'll rarely ever touch it. These are not barriers to entry.
Meanwhile "magic" like Codable or auto-synthesized Equatable conformance is so much simpler and nicer than trying to implement NSCoding or isEquals in Obj-C ever was. So much ugly, error-prone boilerplate just vanishes with Swift.
