[swift-evolution] Annotation of Warnings/Errors
Tino Heth
2th at gmx.de
Tue Jan 31 04:55:24 CST 2017
> One of the biggest issues that I saw while teaching Swift to newbies (most had not programmed before) is confusion based on the early warnings/errors that swift/xcode gives you as they type. What would happen is that they would type a variable, and it would say… “You haven’t used this variable” and so they would just click the fixit because they trust the compiler more than they trust themselves. This would lead to a point where they were very confused because some of the code was code they had thought through, and some of it was changed by random fixits in ways they didn’t understand… and so it would lead to more errors/fixits until they had errors which couldn’t be fixed.
Imho this is the best example to illustrate that inflationary use of warnings does more harm than good, and I hope it will be fixed.
Having a bunch of conditions for warnings looks like overkill to me, and there are alternatives:
- Only show when building
- Only show in release builds
- Linter
That said, I'm going out on a limb and claim I already know how to write code and don't need basic schooling, and showing warnings before I hit compile is merely a distraction.
But there are also Playgrounds which seem to be an important aspect of Swift, especially for newbies who could really benefit from some hints.
There are no linters, no release builds, and even no regular builds for Playgrounds, so your model is the only one that works for them.
Bottom line:
+1
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