On my most recent project, I decided to try going Swift from the start. I did the same thing when I started working on a rewrite of the Lovely app around the end of last summer, but found the tools too immature then. This time I’ve spent about a week with it, and everything seems is working out fine (so far). I’ve tried to keep up reading about the language itself, so the syntax hasn’t held me back much. One difference between now and the last time I really dove into Swift is that either something in my brain has clicked regarding optionals, or the language changed a bit over the past six months to make optionals align with my brain more. I still can’t what the debugger commands are.
The other day on Twitter, I was part of a discussion comparing Swift to Objective-C. My feeling is that Swift isn’t better, but some parts of it are delightful to me, and I like it. For example, method overloading in Swift is pretty great, and I’m looking forward to doing interesting things with enums. Better though? In some ways, but not in others. Colin Cornaby pointed out that the ease of dropping down to C in Objective-C comes up a lot, and that C++ compatibility is pretty much a requirement for a lot of apps. I think he’s right.
The way I look at it is this: Objective-C didn’t have to be “broken” for Swift to be a great language. I don’t expect Objective-C to go anywhere in the near future, and that’s a good thing.
