My day job is programming in C# for Windows computers. I was really excited when Swift came out because it’s so similar to other languages I know well and use and admire.
But it turns out that for me, the language is not at all the hurdle for learning Cocoa programming. Apple’s incredibly frustrating UI objects such as NSTableView are the same no matter what language you use. (Frustrating for newbies, at least. I’m sure there are those among you who have no trouble getting tables to do what you want…) Even buying Xamarin so I could code in my familiar C# would do nothing to make creating my app any easier. Switching from Obj-C to Swift only added new frustrations for me because Swift optionals proved to be a great pain, and the way Xcode admonishes you that an argument name is extraneous if you type it in but missing if you leave it off is comically annoying. The IDE will get better and hopefully the language will change to make optionals less of a burden. But for now it seems to me that coding in Swift just adds more friction to an already difficult task. (It’s easy to see that the things which make Swift painful for me are necessary for interoperation with Objective-C. If Apple gets to the point they can leave Obj-C behind and banish it from all libraries, optionals and named arguments could be deprecated and Swift would then be an easier and better language to use. That’s going to be Apple’s challenge, to get “everybody” to use Swift instead of Obj-C despite the rough edges caused by legacy Obj-C.) — Charles Jenkins On Thursday, October 30, 2014 at 18:57, Graham Cox wrote: > > On 31 Oct 2014, at 5:38 am, David Hoerl <dho...@mac.com > (mailto:dho...@mac.com)> wrote: > > > Looks great, but I cannot read Objective C anymore - where is the Swift > > version??? > > > Obj-C isn't going anywhere soon, and Swift isn't yet ready for hardcore > commercial use. I can't see the transition taking any less than five years, > so what are you going to do in that time? Just twiddle your thumbs, or get on > with building your apps? > > --Graham _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
