What does this even mean? Modern Swift looks like a haphazard mishmash of conflicting features where every problem is solved by "just one more keyword bro". In 2024 it had 217 keywords: https://x.com/jacobtechtavern/status/1841251621004538183 and that was reduced slightly, to 203, in 2025: https://x.com/jacobtechtavern/status/1962242782405267617
According to Lattner they never even had the time to design anything due to time pressure from Apple [1]. So Swift ended up with a type system that the compiler can't even check and is impossible to fix. So the compiler routinely just gives up and complains on even the most trivial code.
[1] https://youtu.be/ovYbgbrQ-v8?si=tAko6n88PmpWrzvO&t=1400
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Swift has turned into a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff...
We had a ton of users, it had a ton of iternal technical debt... the whole team was behind, and instead of fixing the core, what the team did is they started adding all these special cases.
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you... just described Swift, really :)
Also, all those features exist even if you don't use them all. Which makes the language complex, cumbersome, and makes its compiler slow, complex and brittle. A language shouldn't be a collection of one-off edge cases, and this has nothing to do with ideological purity
Whatever the case, I don't enjoy writing languages more obsessed with theory or design purity (like Kotlin) as much.
I've found writing Swift code very pleasant, but I've been doing it for ten years, so that helps I suppose. The biggest productivity impact for day-to-day use for me in the last few years has been the new concurrency model.