> On Feb 19, 2017, at 1:00 AM, Rien via swift-evolution > <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote: > > Hello All, > > Its Sunday, time for some reflection... > > One of the big plusses of Objective-C was that the entire manual was just a > few pages long. I have not looked it up, but IIRC the entire manual > describing the language was probably less than 50 pages. Much less if you > subtract the filler stuff.
If you add the size of the C specification, Objective-C is actually a very large language, with all kinds of quirks and undefined behavior. Most people coming to Objective-C already have some familiarity with C-like languages though, so I think this aspect is forgotten sometimes. > I have been on this list now for a few weeks, and I see very little push-back > on new suggestions. Most of the reactions are positive-constructive. IMO we > need more push-back. Without it behemoth status is all but guaranteed. > > I don’t know about the core team, I don’t know about Apple, I don’t know > where they want to go. I think it is good and healthy that all kinds of outlandish ideas get discussed on this list; even if they never end up getting implemented — the discussions further mutual understanding and inspire better ideas in the future. It wouldn’t be productive for us to just unilaterally shut down such discussions. Remember there’s a long road from “pitching an idea” to “core team accepts a proposal”. The bar for proposals accepted into Swift 4 is considerably higher; think of it as, “without this proposal, the language is fundamentally broken for an important use-case”. Also I think one important quality of the Swift design is “progressive disclosure”. There are some advanced features, but they are layered on in such a way that one does not need to absorb most of them in order to be productive in the language. They can be learned over time. This is unlike, say, C++, where a lot of complexity has to be understood up-front before you can really write good modern C++. It’s not necessarily a bad thing if a well-designed language with advanced features and a large standard library has a big manual. > I just want to make a plea here: Please stop Swift from becoming a behemoth. As someone who admires small languages like Scheme, Smalltalk, Forth and ML, I can assure you that your point of view has its proponents here ;-) And I think the core team has very good taste when it comes to these things as well. Slava > > I don’t know if the millions (?) of Swift developers not on this list agree > with me. I somehow think they do, after all they are not on this list! They > are not looking to change Swift... > > Well, I just had to get that off my chest... > > To close this off, I do want to take this opportunity to thank the core team > for their work, I truly appreciate it! > And whatever may come, here is one happy Swift user! > > Best regards, > Rien > > Site: http://balancingrock.nl > Blog: http://swiftrien.blogspot.com > Github: http://github.com/Balancingrock > Project: http://swiftfire.nl > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > swift-evolution mailing list > swift-evolution@swift.org > https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution _______________________________________________ swift-evolution mailing list swift-evolution@swift.org https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
