[swift-evolution] [Review] SE-0144: Allow Single Dollar Sign as a Valid Identifier

[Russ Bishop]

> On Oct 17, 2016, at 11:45 PM, Rien via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> “culturally offensive” is not a logical argument.
> A programming language should be logically consistent no matter how many cultures are offended by it.
> If Swift is driven by SJW’s then very quickly it will cease to be an effective language.


I don’t think using “SJW” as a slur is appropriate, certainly not in swift-evolution. We aim to be an open and inclusive community. Cultural sensitivity is one of Swift’s goals; that’s why it supports Unicode identifiers… so people can use their native language if they wish. The world is not the Western Latin-1 character set.

None of these goals are mutually-exclusive with logical arguments; that’s a false dichotomy. 

I’m not aware of any programming language that is 100% logically consistent. They all make concessions to programmer culture, history, practical concerns, and even opinion/whims. Python doesn’t have multi-line lambdas because Guido doesn’t like them. Even Haskell has unsafePerformIO because the real world is not a pure function. We talk about how beautiful or ugly syntax is all the time, which is absolutely a value judgement.



Russ