**Note: I am using an example in my blog of a post written by a developer in our community. I have noticed many posts with the same thoughts expressed in them and I am in no way attacking this particular person, who I respect a great deal. I want to preface this with saying I am in no way attacking the author of this piece or trying to single him out, so I hope he will not be offended that I am offering a counterpoint to his post.**

This morning I had someone send me a link to this article and asked me what I thought about it.

Honestly? I am kind of sick of everyone crapping on Swift.

I am tired of everyone saying the language is broken and that you can’t write real applications with it because it’s half baked and unusable.

I don’t mean to keep waving my credentials around, but I am working on a project where we are rewriting our software in Swift. We are not writing the usual weather app/something that pulls data from an API. This is some heavy duty crap. We are writing this on the Mac. We are using a serial port to connect to outside hardware. This is a legacy project that is on its third rewrite that has been around for ten years. So far we have not encountered anything that we can’t do in Swift that is being done in the original software.

For the last month or so I have been bashing my head against a project where I am implementing libXML in our project (which I am going to write a blog post about shortly.) Taking a really under documented C library where the sample code is written in Pascal and trying to get it to work in Swift has been a demoralizing massive pain in the ass. I have had to deal with all kinds of horrors that I didn’t know existed or were abstracted away so that I would usually never have had to deal with them again.

However, doing those things has made me a better developer. Just because I came into Cocoa programming after ARC doesn’t mean that I have no reason to think about it or know how it works.

I started learning programming three years ago. Prior to that, I didn’t know how to write a “for” loop without looking it up online. I was one of those noobs that people hate on Stack Overflow who ask how to do incredibly simple and stupid things. Learning programming was hard. It forced me to fundamentally change the way I think about the world. It was also hard because I had a lot of people who had been doing it longer than I had who were crapping on me because I didn’t know who the Gang of Four were or why we do the MVC pattern, or even what MVC means.

There are a lot of things that we think are easy and intuitive that aren’t either but we think they are because they are familiar. My boss told me about working with a woman who had a PhD but had never used a computer before. Our structure of navigating through folders and files is “intuitive” to us because many of us have been doing this for bordering on 30 years.

If you have been doing imperative programming since you were 12, then yeah, some of this stuff is going to feel complicated and unfamiliar. If you don’t have a painful, visceral memory of the pain it took to learn programming the first time, you might think that all of this stuff is complicated and broken and wrong.

I, however, do remember how hard learning programming was. I find learning functional programming and figuring out Swift to be no more difficult than it was learning Objective-C. It’s different. It isn’t broken. Yes, there are some things that will be refined over the next few years, but Objective-C wasn’t born completed either. It evolved over a period of years as Swift will evolve.

I got into programming because I wanted to learn how to solve complex problems. I am excited about Swift because it affords an opportunity to solve a complex problem in a different way than we did before.

I am worried that people’s opinions of Swift are being influenced by a few people’s bad experiences with it. When I have tried to advocate for Swift because of the work I am doing, I get my experiences brushed off because of my boss. I am told that of course Brad Larson can use Swift to control robots. He’s a genius. Us normal people can’t use it because it’s too complicated.

Again, there is a difference between broken, complicated, and unfamiliar. If you go into Swift thinking it should be just like Objective-C, you are going to be disappointed. If you go into it knowing that it is unfamiliar and that you have to fundamentally approach things a different way, then you might be okay with it. If programming was easy, then everyone would be doing it. Just because something is different than the way that you are used to doing something doesn’t mean that it is wrong.

I hope that people who are discouraged will eventually change their mindset about how to approach Swift or some other hybrid language with functional features. Life gets boring if you just do the same thing over and over again in the same way. Programming is a young discipline and we haven’t yet reached the point where we absolutely know that the way we are doing things is best. It will continue to grow and evolve and change. And that’s a good thing.