elegant chaos

A cautionary tale from Christoffer Lernö: To Swift and back again

Doesn’t inspire a great deal of confidence.

The big thing that worries me about Swift is the way that Apple’s culture (cult?) of secrecy meant that it was developed in a virtual vacuum, and not even widely dog-fooded within Apple.

Writing a new programming language is a bit like doing a cover of Stairway to Heaven. It’s the kind of thing every aspiring programmer wants to do, and the results usually range from mildly embarrassing to excruciatingly bad. To pull it off, you have to be fucking good.

There’s no denying the pedigree of Swift’s authors, but I actually think that a better name for the language might have been Hubris.