The Problem With Swift

Swift is a general-purpose programming language with clear syntax. When I first began learning Swift around the year 2010, I was excited about the language and felt it could be one of the leading programming languages in the future.

However, as years passed, I began to feel disillusioned about Swift. The major problem I encountered was that each time the language was updated, many of my example programs stopped working. The language kept breaking itself on each version. This was not just a pre-1.0 language issue—Swift 1.0 had been released already.

Even in the Swift 5.0 era, things as simple as looping over the characters in a string kept changing. Programs would not compile in newer compilers. Function arguments now had to be specified in a different way, and tons of errors and warnings would appear on previously-correct code.

A computer language is not an art project—it is something that people rely on to build programs. Perhaps early Swift versions were not yet ready to be released, and Apple wanted to continue changing the language to fit their internal needs for macOS and iOS programs. In any case Swift (at least in 2010) ended up being a poor choice for outside developers.