Fun with Swift
&gt; Swift is widely marketed as a functional language<p>If that&#x27;s true, those sources reporting that are wrong. Apple itself refers to it instead as a &quot;protocol-oriented language&quot; when it&#x27;s not just saying &quot;object-oriented&quot;.<p>Swift is definitely not a functional language in the way that it usually means, and Apple knows this, and any legit survey of languages wouldn&#x27;t clump it together with much more functional languages. For example, this guy[0] knows what he is talking about.<p>&gt; Where Swift shines it is in the integratiion with the underlying Objective C frameworks on the Mac.<p>&gt;Swift is a good replacement for contexts in which Objective-C would be used.<p>Except when you try to do anything with OpenGL or a C-based API, like Core Audio. Swift is really lagging for &quot;power programming&quot; with these low-level APIs. It&#x27;s great for beginners who use all the high-level frameworks (though &quot;great&quot; is a subjective term I don&#x27;t really agree with for Swift), but a lot of people who really need to get stuff done on Apple&#x27;s platform are not going whole-hog Swift.<p>&gt;If you’re coming form Erlang&#x2F;Haskell world you’ll think Swift is verbose and a bit of a mess but if you’re coming from Objective-C you’ll think “Swift is concise and elegant”<p>I got to be honest, I still find I prefer Objective-C, because, it&#x27;s essentially C. I can use my C structs and interfaces with zero problem. But in Swift, all C primitives are translated into Swift-only stuff, even integers!<p>And don&#x27;t get me started with trying to use a C++ library with Swift, something that&#x27;s smooth with Objective-C. Which is ironic since Swift itself is written in C++.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;robnapier.net&#x2F;swift-is-not-functional" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;robnapier.net&#x2F;swift-is-not-functional</a>