[swift-evolution] A concern

Tino Heth 2th at gmx.de
Sun Feb 19 09:59:56 CST 2017


Many developers classified Swift as a behemoth right when it was published, so it is a highly personal question wether a language is to complicated or to simple.
I guess there are two potential dangers:
People have different preferences, and Swift could try to make everyone happy: Using BEGIN/END or indentation as an alternative to braces would be such thing.
So far, Swift has kept the the claim of being opinionated, and I guess this won't change. We even saw things like tuple splat and currying being dropped…

Additionally, there is a certain aspect of different opinion that has much more potential for harm:
There are people who love rules and want to regulate as much as possible, and there are those with a more relaxed mindset.
The thing that is special about this pair of extremes is the way both groups tend to fight for their goals, because someone with a laissez-faire attitude won't fight at all, whereas the urge to control is a driving force of the other extreme.

So I'm sure that if the evolution process would be democratic, it would accumulate special cases and rules for them quickly — but we can keep the hope that those who decide about Swifts future are aware of the problem, and weight their decisions accordingly.
Right now, there is a debate about rolling back some changes with the access levels, and there was even a suggestion to remove all but two of them...


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