
Reflections on six months of Swift - ingve
http://khanlou.com/2016/05/six-months-of-swift/
======
bluejekyll
The language backward compatibility with future versions is a big deal. Is
this article accurate as to the state of the world?

The thing that was always amazing about Java, was that with every release of
the JVM and language, they never broke backward compatibility in one release.
They gave people a good 2 years between versions that had breaking changes.

Is swift just not stable enough yet?

~~~
melling
Java would have been a better language if they had breaking changes. However,
they prioritized compatibility. Type erasure is a big compromise, for example.

Personally, I thinks it's better to have breaking changes and a good
conversation tool.

Apple will have most Swift developers on Swift 3.x this year. Next year
everyone will do the quick upgrade to Swift 4.x. Apple really takes advantage
of migrating its users and developers to their latest versions.

Swift is much less verbose than Objective C. I think it's better to deal with
the changes. You'll still write less code:

[http://ctarda.com/2016/05/clarity-is-more-important-than-
bre...](http://ctarda.com/2016/05/clarity-is-more-important-than-brevity-
sometimes-you-can-have-both)

[https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/should-i-use-
objecti...](https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/should-i-use-objective-c-
or-swift-for-writing-ios-apps/)

~~~
bluejekyll
Sure, but look at the python community, 3 is still not being used everywhere
because of non-backward compatible changes to the language.

It's an easy thing to say, but I think the success of Java was mainly due to
this. I agree that tyoe erasure was a horrible compromise, and they should
have revisited it sooner, but the language never left you behind.

~~~
melling
That's because the Python community had a choice to stick with 2.x. If you go
with Swift, Apple will make you upgrade.

