Paul, Daniel, Dave

Paul Kim, On Dynamism:

My problems aren’t performance. They aren’t type-safety (maybe it’s just me, but I rarely have issues with it and when I do, the time it takes to fix it is far less than the time specifying everything to a tee everywhere else). They aren’t being able to write clever VDLs. For me, it’s writing apps that solve my users’ problems and getting them out in a timely fashion. As it stands now, Swift (at least pure-Swift, or even current Swift as a non-ABI-stable moving target) does not do that for me.

Now maybe these same problems can be solved in a static way but what I’m not seeing from the static-camp are (decent) solutions. What I’m seeing are either hand-waving or the same crufty code-generation, write tons of repetitive boilerplate type of solutions that I had hoped we had left behind in the 90s.

What I do see makes me worry that it’s not the experienced app-writers that are being heard.

* * *

Daniel Jalkut, Not Perfected Here:

Swift is a fascinating, beautiful language. How will it evolve to prove superior, in the long-run to Objective-C? By providing a suite of impedance-matched frameworks that fulfill all the needs of current iOS and Mac developers.

* * *

Dave DeLong posted 12 tweets on the subject, starting here, and including:

5/ but one of the things I love about @SwiftLang is that, since the dynamism isn’t there, I have to think about problems in new ways

…and…

8/ I know that the people working on @SwiftLang are some of the most brilliant people in the world, and they all also love Objective-C

…and…

10/ so maybe we’ll end up dynamism. Maybe we won’t. What we WILL end up with is one of the most kick-ass languages in the world

Though I could ask about the frameworks (and I did), I can’t argue with Dave’s conclusion. I’ve said before, and will say again, that I’m writing all my new code in Swift and I’m enjoying it a ton, and I get bugged when I have to write Objective-C.

In other words — if you think that the various people writing about Swift and dynamism are anti-Swift, you’ve got it wrong.