
“Is It Time for Swift?” with Ben Sandofsky - astigsen
https://realm.io/news/ben-sandofsky-time-for-swift/
======
timburks
Along with the ARC transition, the move from PowerPC to Intel was incredibly
smooth (relatively). But much of the work for that was done long before the
change actually happened.

Both of those changes required very little from developers. Obviously a new
language is going to take much more. The biggest challenge with Swift is
keeping the programming interface simple. While it gets rid of the @ signs
that people stumble over in Objective-C, Swift didn't really reduce the amount
of learning required to create a program. Rather, it seems to be everyone's
new favorite place to talk about exotic programming concepts, which results in
terrifying blog posts like this one:
[https://developer.ibm.com/swift/2016/01/27/seven-swift-
snare...](https://developer.ibm.com/swift/2016/01/27/seven-swift-snares-how-
to-avoid-them/)

I wonder how long it will be before someone like Douglas Crockford shows up
with Swift: The Good Parts.

~~~
Grustaf
I think the major advantage for new developers isn't the level of conceptual
complexity but much clearer and cleaner syntax, which also happens to be more
inline with most other modern popular languages. That's a major advantage.

------
Grustaf
I often hear the argument that "Swift is changing too fast, let's wait until
it settles down" but the changes so far have really been minute. It's not even
a factor at all for us.

Taking our app (40 kloc) and our SDK (4 kloc) from 1.2 to 2 took us less than
3 hours. Almost all changes were correctly migrated by the built in migration
tool.

The Bro app couldn't possibly take more than 15 minutes.

~~~
sandofsky
Considering the talk didn't show any screenshots, describe all the
specifications, or even provide a line count, where are you getting 15 minutes
from?

~~~
Grustaf
From the fact that the app is a clone of Yo.

~~~
sandofsky
It isn't a clone of "yo." It's based on it. It has a superset of its features.

I'd go into detail, but my point is your tone of authority when you have
absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

~~~
Grustaf
I'm sorry about my tone, but my point is that even our sprawling app was
converted almost automatically. The breaking changes are very few, and even
fewer of them require any action on the part of the developer (the only
exception I can think of is error handling). It can't possibly take a week to
migrate Yo, unless you spent months writing it.

------
iteps
This was very insightful. My director has been asking why we're not porting to
swift yet. I now got the answer.

..."BECAUSE OF YOUR TOXIC DEADLINES".

