Comment by budgefrankly
6 hours ago
Yeah, Swift looks like someone started trying to port a C# syntax onto an esoteric object-orientated C-dialect (similar to Vala and GObject) then at the last moment noticed Rust 1.0 had been released, tried to patch on some Rust features, and hit release before they were done.
It's quite deceptive. Rust seems initially hard to learn, but it's a small language, so you arrive at competency faster than you might think. Swift seems initially easy to learn, but is a broad language with lots of edge-cases, so you're never quite as competent as you think you are, or need to be
Ehh I have been using Swift from the beginning and I disagree with you and the parent. Swift was "good" before the addition of property wrappers and the result builder syntax. That's when lots of the weird "features" started being bolted on.
Before that it just felt like what a modern OO language with reference and value types, type safety, some very light "not truly functional but nice to have" functional programming features, and readable, "normal", dot syntax would be like. The language was basically complete at that point for the purposes of writing UI apps with the existing Apple frameworks.