Jens, I agree with what you say, but for the record, there was no sarcasm in my message. I was speaking very literally about what I thought I heard in the WWDC ’14 intro versus what I encountered when I began using it.
-- Charles On Monday, June 15, 2015 at 13:50, Jens Alfke wrote: > > > On Jun 15, 2015, at 5:30 AM, Charles Jenkins <cejw...@gmail.com > > (mailto:cejw...@gmail.com)> wrote: > > I may have misinterpreted the WWDC ’14 announcement of Swift. Somehow I got > > the impression Swift was supposed to make Mac programming easier and more > > fun. > > Can we pleeeeeease stay away from sarcasm in this thread. Language flame-wars > suck and we’re very close to having one. > > The only thing I’ll say about this is that programming includes debugging and > testing, not just hammering out code. What I’m finding with Swift is that it > makes me think about more stuff about up-front, which can be annoying when > I’m just learning the language, but it’s better to explicitly consider > questions like “what happens if this is nil?” or “what types can this > collection hold?” than to run into them later when the app unexpectedly > crashes or misbehaves. > > (In the case of string manipulation, it makes the easy stuff wayyyy > > harder.) > A lot of the “easy” stuff in NSString is only easy because it's Doing It > Wrong*, i.e. assuming characters are 16-bit and ignoring a bunch of the > details of Unicode. As a result if you’re not careful you end up with code > that breaks in many non-Roman languages and, nowadays, with emoji (which are > up in the 32-bit character space.) > > So what you’re really saying is that _Unicode_ makes stuff harder, which is > true, but that’s only because our ancestors were illogical and came up with > hundreds of thousands of different characters and symbols to communicate > with, instead of sticking to a simple set of 255. > > —Jens > > * To be fair, NSString was designed long ago when Unicode _was_ 16-bit. _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
