The Curious Case of Swift's Adoption of Smalltalk Keyword Syntax
As is tradition, I&#x27;m going to take the discussion one level up and talk about the language as a whole, although my issue is related to this syntactical change. The problem Swift has right now is that the review process is marred by <i>huge</i> conflicts-of-interests. The people reviewing proposals are very closely affiliated with, or sometimes the same people, that proposed it and want it implemented. And that&#x27;s not to say they aren&#x27;t smart, reasonable people; quite the opposite: it&#x27;s just that they have their own interests when they&#x27;re adding features to the language, and they ignore the community when doing so.<p>When initial SwiftUI changes came through, they were &quot;proposed&quot; by Apple engineers even though they already shipped in Xcode. Sure, they got a bit of feedback and change, but everyone largely knew they were going in regardless and they did. When callAsFunction came in (which I actually think is a useful feature, just spelled horribly) it was obvious that it was being pushed heavily by the Swift for TensorFlow people. And who reviewed it? Chris Lattner, who approved it even though <i>nobody</i> really liked the name at all. And with this case we see a fairly dubious benefit being pushed forward by the team at Apple, and everyone knows it&#x27;s going to be for some sort of SwiftUI DSL thing, except they can&#x27;t really tell us what it is and currently it provides a new the way to call a bunch of functions that is unergonomic and extremely special-purposed.<p>When people say that Swift is adding &quot;useless features&quot; they don&#x27;t really think that Swift should stop evolving; it&#x27;s just that they&#x27;re frustrated that stupid things like these keep getting added and that the Swift Evolution community as a whole is unable to stop them from being merged in or modified substantially.