I’ve been watching WWDC videos about Swift. The language is undergoing big changes which will likely irritate many people. Every project that has been created in Swift will need to have at least one line of code changed and likely more. This is exactly the type of “bad thing” that people waiting to adopt Swift have been warnings about – the change that breaks everything and makes everything you already know useless.
The leaders and contributors on the Swift project, which is open source, had to know that they’d get significant pushback against a change this big that has the potential to break so many things. But in the name of getting the language right they pushed through. They have a higher standard that their pushing themselves toward and they knew they didn’t get there on the first iteration so they are making the necessary changes.
Almost all the code I’ve written over the last two years has been in Swift and each of the projects will need to be modified. I’m not irritated at this fact or the people who decided to change Swift. I love that they are raising the bar on quality and making something truly great. It inspires me to strive for the same.