How many keywords are needed to mark a language as complex?
It became quite
a trending discussion on Twitter this week.
Some argue the more keywords, the more complexity, while others see it as more flexibility and possibilities. Swift leads the graph with ~120 keywords compared to number 2 PHP with ~80 keywords. Still, I much rather develop in Swift than PHP!
Swift is a relatively young language, designed with learnings from other languages as inspiration. In my opinion, it's not an easy language,
but definitely, a flexible language allowing us to write the great applications we write today.
Lastly, the fact that many keywords exist doesn't mean you have to use them. You can perfectly build apps w/o custom property wrappers and result builders. I'm pretty sure there's no app out there using all 120 keywords in the same project.
Related to keywords, a new
update of SwiftLee is on its way, improving the overall syntax highlighting in code examples. Have you already tried the
new keywords navigation?Enjoy this week's SwiftLee Weekly!
