Tuesday 27 October 2015

Things I learnt from Swift Summit

I attended the first Swift Summit on 21st of March; there were two days but I only went to the first. Here are some of the facts I learned:
  • Int is not a fundamental type as you would think of it in most languages. 
    • Instead it's a struct that derives SignedIntegerType with the actual value being an instance of the really fundamental type Bultin.World
    • Being a struct means it's a proper object hence its methods, the ability to extend (see later) and can (& does )implement protocols
  • Int can be extended
    • As it's an object (see above) it's possible to write extensions methods.
  • I have a far better understanding of what @autoclosure does now
    • It basically captures  the function rather than invoking it
  • nil is never actually treated as nil when used
And now for some opinion about the day.
  • People seem to be struggling with error handling
    • A couple of talks presented code to avoid pyramids of doom in regard to making a call, checking for success/failure and if successful continuing.
  • People think they're doing Functional Programming
    • Just because Swift supports Functional Programming style and some people use elements of FP they assume Swift is mainly a Functional language and that they are doing Functional Programming.
    • Passing functions arounds as first-class objects does not make your program functional
  • Some people now hate Objective-C