[swift-evolution] [planning] [discussion] Schedule for return of closure parameter labels (+ world domination ramble)

[Mathew Huusko V]

Thanks for the swift response, it's an honour; I agree wholeheartedly with
your logic and sentiment. Sorry if I was unclear, but my concern/curiosity
is not for the speed of Swift's development, but in fact for its long term
evolution and longevity. At risk of repeating myself/boring everyone, that
concern manifests over two intermingling phenomena:
1) in the evolution email/proposal archive, a well intentioned (towards
-complexity and +quality) but sometimes blasé air around potential
uses/requirements of the language (~"Swift won't support that because
people probably wouldn't use/need it").
2) the reality of the clock, or what I think/thought the reality was.
Obviously I don't want Swift to evolve too fast, and don't think having any
particular feature right now is worth risking that, but won't the ABI be
stabilised eventually (Swift 5?) and then it will actually be too late for
some features? Please correct me if I'm wrong here.

A possible (not sure if this is ABI bound) example:
As far as I've seen, optional protocol requirements (like 'protected',
private conformances, currying, etc.) are more off the table than
postponed, having been deemed an anti-pattern. Fair enough – I'm inclined
to trust the people involved in those discussions. But what if after ABI
stabilisation people get around to building some significant systems in
Swift (say, UIKit, which relies heavily on optional protocol requirements
for good reason) and don't find reasonable alternatives? There's no going
back, right?

On Fri, Aug 4, 2017 at 6:32 PM, Chris Lattner <clattner at nondot.org> wrote:

>
> On Aug 4, 2017, at 9:16 AM, Mathew Huusko V via swift-evolution <
> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
> Per https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution-announce/2
> 016-July/000233.html, the removal of parameter labels entirely was
> accepted as a temporary loss for Swift 3 as a means to remove them from the
> type system. I'm wondering if they're coming back (syntactically) any time
> soon?
>
>
> The planning approach for Swift 5 hasn’t been announced yet, but it should
> be soon-ish.
>
> Responding to the rest of your email in broad terms: there will always be
> a ton of things that are important and interesting to tackle.  There is
> also a long road ahead of Swift, so prioritization is not a bad thing: just
> because something doesn’t happen “now” doesn’t mean it never will.
>
> I would also argue that it would be *bad* for the language to evolve too
> fast.  Landing 20 major features all in the same year runs the very high
> risk that they doesn’t work well together and don’t have time to settle out
> properly.  It is far more important for Swift to be great over the long
> term than to have any individual little feature “now”.
>
> -Chris
>
>
>
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