[swift-evolution] Language design philosophy, Swift vs Other recent languages

[Jens Persson]

I think Clojure is one of the most interesting new languages (besides Swift
of course) and it looks like it's growing steadily, despite / thanks to
being a lisp etc. And Rich Hickey does a great job of explaining /
marketing / selling the design philosophy of Clojure. He makes Clojure look
so obvious, wonderful and simple (not easy!). He also makes the
conventional languages/ways look so unnecessarily complex, convoluted and
bad.
Like in this talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSdnJDO-xdg
My favorite part is Death by Specificity ~49 minutes in.

I'd like to see more things like that for Swift, showing off the language
and motivating its design decisions. There's of course the great WWDC 2015
talk Protocol Oriented Programming in Swift by Dave Abrahams. And the other
one about value types. I've also seen a few very interesting talks and
articles about SIL and optimization, etc. But any pointers to more such
material would be highly appreciated.

It would also be interesting to hear people on this list compare the design
of Swift to that of some other new languages (eg Clojure, Elm or Rust).

For example:

Why didn't Swift go with S-expressions / homoiconicity? What would the
cost/benefits have been?

How does Swift tackle the problem of Death by Specificity mentioned in the
talk above?

/Jens
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