> On Jun 15, 2015, at 5:30 AM, Charles Jenkins <cejw...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I may have misinterpreted the WWDC ’14 announcement of Swift. Somehow I got > the impression Swift was supposed to make Mac programming easier and more fun.
Can we pleeeeeease stay away from sarcasm in this thread. Language flame-wars suck and we’re very close to having one. The only thing I’ll say about this is that programming includes debugging and testing, not just hammering out code. What I’m finding with Swift is that it makes me think about more stuff about up-front, which can be annoying when I’m just learning the language, but it’s better to explicitly consider questions like “what happens if this is nil?” or “what types can this collection hold?” than to run into them later when the app unexpectedly crashes or misbehaves. > (In the case of string manipulation, it makes the easy stuff wayyyy harder.) A lot of the “easy” stuff in NSString is only easy because it's Doing It Wrong*, i.e. assuming characters are 16-bit and ignoring a bunch of the details of Unicode. As a result if you’re not careful you end up with code that breaks in many non-Roman languages and, nowadays, with emoji (which are up in the 32-bit character space.) So what you’re really saying is that _Unicode_ makes stuff harder, which is true, but that’s only because our ancestors were illogical and came up with hundreds of thousands of different characters and symbols to communicate with, instead of sticking to a simple set of 255. —Jens * To be fair, NSString was designed long ago when Unicode _was_ 16-bit. _______________________________________________ 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
