Swift Diary #12: The P Word

Guy English writes a Swift Protocol Proposal. It’s worth reading the Twitter discussion.

Wooji Juice disagrees, and writes about the genius of Swift protocols.

Daniel Jalkut writes about The Seven Stages of Swift. I think I’m inhabiting several of them at once.

* * *

I’ll try to re-state my issue with protocols again in a simple way.

I’m writing a Finder replacement, let’s say. The UI has folders and files. There’s a Folder class and a File class. They’re quite different things, so there’s no class inheritance.

I want to represent the file system internally as a tree of Folders and Files — let’s say I want to use Sets. A Folder has a children property, which is a Set that contains both Folders and Files.

I want Folder and File both to have a writable name property so the UI can edit their names.

Something like this ought to come naturally and easily to a language, or else that language is not helping me write apps.

This isn’t some weird, made-up situation. It’s super-common. Look at Mail’s sidebar, for instance — there are a bunch of different things. (Or look at Xcode’s sidebar.)

Yes. There are ways to deal with this in Swift, including using @objc protocols and collections. Or proxy objects or base classes (ugh) or whatever.

But the most natural way is protocols.

If my point was just to get my work done and ship a great app as soon as possible, I wouldn’t be using Swift. I’d be using what I know: Objective-C.

But I’m also taking the opportunity to learn Swift, and the best way to really understand it is to use, as much as possible, pure Swift, rather than Swift-with-objc. And if, along the way, I run into questions or things that don’t help me write high-quality apps more quickly, then I’ll ask questions and even criticize when warranted.

My hope (and belief) is that the language designers take the feedback in the spirit intended. I want to help make Swift a great language for writing apps.

The designers may not give me what I want — it’s possible that I’m just asking for a faster horse, and they’re delivering a Model T, after all — but feedback from experienced app-writers ought to warrant attention. (Which I think it gets, which makes me glad.)