> On May 2, 2016, at 2:17 PM, David Hart <da...@hartbit.com> wrote: > John, > > When the core team implemented the `if let x? = y` experiment and later > backtracked, were you enthusiastic about it? The way Jordan puts it "Yeah, as > nice as it sounds, it didn’t work out in practice.” sounds very definite, as > if it was an obvious and unanimous decision to backtrack.
I wouldn't say it "didn't work out in practice." It's not like we ran into some design/implementation hurdle that we weren't expecting. We had adopters who were annoyed at having to make a pervasive change by hand that they felt wasn't an improvement. I felt then (and continue to feel) that it would have been fine if we had spelled it with a question mark to begin with; but since we didn't, it was seen as a pointless regression in the amount of punctuation in Swift code, which was a very sensitive topic at the time. And you know, that's okay. Language design is design, not art; our goal here is to make a great tool that helps people, not to make a perfect self-consistent expression of an idea. If we can do both, wonderful, but if we can't, well, it's pretty nice to have users. John. _______________________________________________ swift-evolution mailing list swift-evolution@swift.org https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
