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Discussion on: Tell us what your top unpopular tech opinion is 😈

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald

YEEEEEEEEEEEEES. Tried to mentor some young developers in Swift, which they were only using because of a free remote coding camp. After two months of struggling (me AND them), I finally recommended they drop the coding camp and learn a real language.

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pomfrit123 profile image
***

What are your top 5 "real" languages?

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

Can't pick. There are hundreds. My personal favorites are C++, Python, and C, but there's no shortage of languages to choose from.

Honestly, Swift is a "real language", in that it's Turing complete, but the sole reason it's used is because Apple pushes for it. Its features are all borrowed from better languages, and then poorly misimplemented into a writhing mass of illogic. The entire reason they started the Apple-funded Swift coding bootcamps was to try and drum up a new user base. Developers were making a mass exodus from the language in favor of, to wit, Objective C, and portable languages besides.

My crack about "use a real language" was really more about "use a language that has a practical use case, and behavior relatively consistent with the rest of programming." If Swift were deleted, the majority of the coding world wouldn't notice for months, and if the conversations I've seen are any indicator, most of the Swift-trained developers wouldn't care.

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rhymes • Edited

Funny coincidence: yesterday I read a super long article about how Google is betting on Swift as the next language for machine learning to replace Python in the long term and some ML researchers seem to agree with the idea: Swift: Google's bet on differentiable programming | Tryolabs Blog.

The article also lists the reasons why they chose it over other more "popular" options.

I've never used Swift, I only know it exists and people use it for iOS apps, so I have no opinion about it :-)