[swift-evolution] Beyond Typewriter-Styled Code in Swift, Adoption of Symbols

[Taylor Swift]

Where is the source for this number? XCode is not even available for Linux.
And XCode’s market share is only shrinking as Swift expands more into the
open source world. To make Swift depend on proprietary XCode features would
nullify all of the work that has been done in the past 2 years to bring
Swift to Linux platforms.

On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 12:44 PM, John Pratt <jprattx at gmail.com> wrote:

> XCode is not just one of many editors to edit Swift you asshole.
>
> It is 99% of all editors used.
>
>
>
> On Aug 31, 2017, at 11:27 AM, Taylor Swift <kelvin13ma at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If you ask me this thread is off topic and belongs on an Apple issue
> tracker or forum. XCode is just one of many editors used to edit Swift
> code, and it should by no means be used as a baseline for language design
> considering it is closed source and only available on one platform,
> compared to a large number of great open source editors.
>
> On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 7:53 AM, Jonathan Hull via swift-evolution <
> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
>> A few thoughts:
>>
>> 1) I would like to see Xcode gain a couple more literal types using the
>> same strategy it does for Image and Color literals
>>
>> 2) I would LOVE to see simple equation typesetting in Xcode
>>
>> (Those two are mostly up to the Xcode team as opposed to swift, I suppose)
>>
>> 3) Why are we pretending like we can always edit swift in a ASCII
>> editor?  The argument that actually using unicode would break things
>> doesn’t seem valid, because Swift has supported unicode since version 1,
>> and people have been using it since that time to name both variables and
>> operators. That doesn’t mean we need a super fancy editor, but I think
>> requiring unicode awareness is completely reasonable.  If your editor from
>> the 1970’s breaks something, it is both your and your editor’s fault, not
>> the code or the library, because Swift has unicode in it’s spec.
>>
>> 4) I don’t think we should let the difficulty of typing certain things
>> stop us.  It is an issue we need to consider, but it is an issue which can
>> be solved fairly easily with good UI design if there is a need. Sure,
>> different editors might solve it in different ways, but they will all solve
>> it if it is useful (and in a few years, we will have all settled on the
>> best approach).  As people have mentioned, it can be difficult to type ‘{‘
>> on certain language layouts, so if we limited ourselves by that we couldn’t
>> do anything.  We shouldn’t adopt a lowest common denominator approach.
>>
>> 5) The lack of ‘≤’ has driven me absolutely nuts since Swift 1. It
>> *won’t* be confusing if we let people do either ‘<=‘ or ‘≤’ (there is
>> research by Apple in the late 80’s that proves this).  We all learned the
>> symbol in math class. Even non-programmers know what it means.  Assigning
>> it any other meaning would be confusing because it’s meaning is so widely
>> known.  Every time I bring this up, I am told to just roll my own (which I
>> have)… but it means that my code will now clash with everyone else’s
>> identical implementation (because there is only one sane way to implement
>> it).  The fact that there are multiple identical implementations
>> interfering with each other (and no real way to make a significantly
>> different implementation) tells me it really should be part of swift
>> itself. Every time I bring it up, people complain about it being extended
>> ASCII instead of pure ASCII, and that it is hard to type on a German
>> keyboard (those people can either just type ‘<=‘ or use a better editor
>> which autocompletes ‘<=‘ to ‘≤’).
>>
>> 6) My recommendations for typing symbols would be:
>> a) Choose a subset of useful and well-known symbols instead of every
>> symbol
>> b) Allow autocomplete on those symbols by name
>> c) Optionally choose a little-used guardian character to start the names
>> of symbols (to avoid accidental autocompletion).
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Jon
>>
>>
>> On Aug 28, 2017, at 7:57 PM, John Pratt via swift-evolution <
>> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>>
>> I sent a postal envelope to the Swift team with an article I wrote,
>> arguing that
>> symbols and graphics would push the programming language forward.
>>
>> Wouldn’t it be nice to have an actual multiplication matrix broken out
>> into code,
>> instead of typing, “matrix()”?  It seems to me Swift has the chance to do
>> that.
>>
>> Also: why does "<==" still reside in code as "less than or equal to” when
>> there is a unicode equivalent that looks neat?
>>
>> Why can’t the square of x have a superscript of 2 instead of having
>> “pow(x,2)?
>> I think this would make programming much easier to deal with.
>>
>> I expound on this issue in my article:
>>
>> http://www.noctivagous.com/nct_graphics_symbols_prglngs_draft2-3-12.pdf
>>
>> Thank you for reading.
>>
>>
>> -John
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>
>
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