[swift-evolution] Seriously! Freeze Swift For Two Years After Release 3.0 !

[Saagar Jha]

Most source breaking changes will be made in Swift 3. From now on code
should be mostly backwards compatible.

On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 11:28 AM Ted F.A. van Gaalen via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

> Hi there
>
> From the perspective from many active programmers
> that use Swift (not objective C anymore) I am  not
> very happy by having to change
> program source all the time:
>
> Therefore after Swift 3.0 is released I’d recommend kindly:
>
>
> Freeze Swift For Some Time!
> Do Not Change AnyThing For At Least 2 Years.
> (Yes you’ve read that correctly: two years.)
>
> Still there? OK, read on:
>
> In the mean time, you’ll have the great opportunity
> to fine-tune compiler and run time systems, to eliminate
> the few bugs there and make it blazingly fast!
>
> In two (or more) years,  there are enough Real Users (programmers)
> that by then will have enough practical experience with Swift, which
> might play a more solid role in improving Swift, and of course,
> are extremely happy with Swift, and that it is not changed
> all the time, So that they can concentrate on writing cool,
> reliable and decent programs, instead of revising it all
> the time!
>
> After such time, and much more intensive and practical usage,
> it becomes clear, what is good in Swift and what is not.
> What happens now, for instance, is that some base their “statistics” of
> which
> language elements etc. are frequently used or not, merely upon scanning
> a codebase of the relatively few (compared with e.g. ObjC, Java or C#)
> programmers
> that use Swift now
>
> Imho, Swift has not yet been in use long enough. It needs a prolonged time
> because now, most users have relatively little experience using Swift,
> thus the way they program now is not really representative with what one
> really can do
> with this powerful language, compared to experienced (years, not months)
> programmers in other languages.
> Still a lot has to be discovered, has to settle and form good mental
> pictures in
> programmer’s minds. It is all going a bit too fast, I think.
>
>
> Please (if you did’t already) realize that already many source
> code all over the world is written in Swift therefore it is very, very
> important that backwards compatibility should be preserved as much
> as possible. because  backwards-breaking-changes are a disaster
> to companies/individuals that have already hundreds or thousands
> of programs written in Swift.
>
> For comparison, until recently I did also programming projects on IBM
> mainframes for banks, insurance companies etc. The systems they use
> consists
> (per company) of literally thousands of Cobol and/or PL/1 programs written
> in all the years from ca 1970 until now. Still, one can take a program
> written
> in 1970 which compiles and runs flawlessly without any modification!
> All is backward compatible. If you would break backward
> compatibility in this domain you would probably be kicked of the planet..
>
>
> But even if we remain in macOS or iOS development, a huge amount of source
> code has been written in Objective C. Everyone would scream hell if you
> took
> out or change language elements..
> So please don’t. (it’s unnecessary)
>
>
> When Swift arrived, to me, it had already everything I need, not really
> missing anything.
> Of course, a programming language -like all things in life- is never
> perfect.
>
> To me it was also perfectly OK that Swift wasn’t open source, because
> those that
> have made Swift did a very good job. So one could even start thinking, why
> open source Swift? Why not leave it to Apple?
> But I guess I won’t make many friends asking this..
> And I also realize that many good ideas comes from open source.
>
>
> To me, Swift 2.2 and also 3.0  is fine.
> so, after that:
> you don’t have to change a thing.
> it works and has everything I need
> and is fast and stable.
> stop removing things.
> thanks.
>
>
> Kind Regards from beautiful Speyer.de in Germany
>
> TedvG
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> swift-evolution at swift.org
> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
>
-- 
-Saagar Jha
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