Learning Swift via Advent Of Code

[markgritter]

This year I participated in the Advent of Code contest in a new programming language, Swift. New both to me and objectively! The language is still in active development. I posted my solutions on GitHub: https://github.com/mgritter/aoc2016 (Technically only 24 programs, because

Comments

[markgritter]

I dunno. Not enough community to move to Dreamwidth. Not motivated enough to move to Wordpress or self-hosting. And LJ sort of serves as my RSS reader today. My long-term plan is to move to a domain I control but until that point inertia probably wins.

[timprov]

I can fire you up a Wordpress in about fifteen minutes anytime you like.

[brooksmoses]

I imagine that "whitespace matters for operators" may end up like the "indents are syntax" of Python in that it's a horrible bizarre completely-wrong idea from the perspective of every other programming language but then makes sense once one is used to it. But right now I'm at the "that's horrible, bizarre, and completely-wrong" stage of looking at it. Especially the "both is the same as neither" aspect of it, which to me just seems like an admission that it's a terrible idea.

I'll be interested to hear what you think of Go, if you end up learning that next. My team at work has been building some new build-system bits in it, so I've been poking at it somewhat, though mostly from a "learning enough of the syntax to review code and occasionally fix bugs" level.

[markgritter]

I was underimpressed with Go when Iooked at it early on. Goroutines seem reasonable but I didn't feel like there was much there that had been learned from several decades of programming languages, to motivate a change.

But, my friend who was recently job-hunting says he looked at about 20 places, of which 2 were C++, and the rest evenly split between Node.JS and Go.

[brooksmoses]

Yeah, I'm not too surprised at that initial impression. The ways that Go reflects the personalities of its development team are very interesting, yes. It's ... very Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

I also find it fascinating in a lot of ways that one of the features of the language is that just about the first thing they self-hosted was a code-formatting tool and then they carefully grew the culture around the programming language to include the idea that code is always auto-formatted. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing to focus on, that's not even an axis I've seen other programming-language inventors talking about.

I'm still not sure what I think about it, overall.