The Decade of Swift
I like a lot about Swift: strong typing, good support for closures, reasonable abstractions. But there&#x27;s a lot that I dislike too. A lot. In general, I find the language to be far too trendy and fussy. I get the impression the design was guided by the goal of streamlining snippets of code meant to highlight cool features, gaining undesirable complexity as a result. One example: Do we really need $n function parameters? In just about every other language, a function has parameters, period. Those names are used inside the function. Depending on the language they may be used outside the function too. Swift separates those inside and outside views, permitting different names for both. And then allows for no names at all! I don&#x27;t care. $n parameters seem to come from primitive languages like sh, and should have stayed there.<p>get&#x2F;set&#x2F;didSet introduces ridiculous complications just so we can pretend that a large number of function invocations look like assignment statements. This was a cool idea in C++, briefly, and then we discovered that having arbitrary code hide behind what looks like an ordinary assignment statement was a bad idea.<p>Extensions also remind me of C++ excesses. It is difficult to look at a piece of code involving a variable some type and be sure that I understand how that type works. The problem is that the code implementing the type is not in one place. There is the type definition, but then there are extensions. Possibly many of them. Defined all over the place.<p>I really dislike the irregularity surrounding let. In one context in unwraps an Optional. In another context it does not. Why?<p>I got off the Swift train at the release in which associated types were introduced. I&#x27;m sure it solves some actual problem, but it sure wasn&#x27;t clear at the time. (The project ended -- it&#x27;s not that I decided to go back to Objective C.)<p>Reference counting is far too intrusive, and it is easy to get it wrong in subtle ways. I find Java&#x27;s (!) memory model relatively simple, and that&#x27;s saying something. I understand why reference counting was chosen over GC. I don&#x27;t have a good answer, but reference counting is just ugly. I actually think I prefer the C&#x2F;C++ model of explicitly freeing memory.