I have spent 2 years of my life with Swift and I would say that I have a very well informed aversion to the language.
Some ideas in the language or parts of its core concepts are really good. First class optionals and sum types, keyword arguments, etc., I liked all of those.
Unfortunately, by and large, Swift is lipstick put on a pig.
I have never used any other language that regularly gave me type errors that were WRONG. Nowhere else have I seen the error message "expression is too complex to be type-checked", especially when all you do is concatenating a bunch of strings. No other mainstream language has such shoddy Linux support (it has an official binary that works on Ubuntu... but not even a .deb package; parts of Foundation are unimplemented on Linux, others behave differently than on macOS; the installation breaks system paths, making it effectively impossible to install Python afterwards[1]). Not to mention, Swift claims to be memory-safe but this all flies out of the window once you're in a multithreaded environment (for example, lazy variables are not threadsafe).
In addition, I regularly visited the Swift forums. The community is totally deluded and instead of facing the real problems of the language (and the tooling), it continues to bikeshed minor syntactic "improvements" (if they even are improvements) just so the codes reads "more beautifully", for whatever that is supposed to mean.
But the worst thing is how the community, including your post, thinks Swift (and Apple) is this godsend, the language to end all language wars, and that everyone will eventually adopt it en masse. Even if Swift were a good language, that would be ridiculous. There was even a thread on that forum called "crowdfunding world domination". It has since become awfully quiet...
Some ideas in the language or parts of its core concepts are really good. First class optionals and sum types, keyword arguments, etc., I liked all of those.
Unfortunately, by and large, Swift is lipstick put on a pig. I have never used any other language that regularly gave me type errors that were WRONG. Nowhere else have I seen the error message "expression is too complex to be type-checked", especially when all you do is concatenating a bunch of strings. No other mainstream language has such shoddy Linux support (it has an official binary that works on Ubuntu... but not even a .deb package; parts of Foundation are unimplemented on Linux, others behave differently than on macOS; the installation breaks system paths, making it effectively impossible to install Python afterwards[1]). Not to mention, Swift claims to be memory-safe but this all flies out of the window once you're in a multithreaded environment (for example, lazy variables are not threadsafe).
In addition, I regularly visited the Swift forums. The community is totally deluded and instead of facing the real problems of the language (and the tooling), it continues to bikeshed minor syntactic "improvements" (if they even are improvements) just so the codes reads "more beautifully", for whatever that is supposed to mean.
But the worst thing is how the community, including your post, thinks Swift (and Apple) is this godsend, the language to end all language wars, and that everyone will eventually adopt it en masse. Even if Swift were a good language, that would be ridiculous. There was even a thread on that forum called "crowdfunding world domination". It has since become awfully quiet...
[1]: https://bugs.swift.org/browse/SR-10344