Learning Swift – Confusion on Conciseness

Is Swift too concise for beginners?

This is not the first time I’ve tried to learn Swift. The first go took place maybe October/November 2020. I followed the official Apple Landmarks tutorial (called Creating and Combining Views) and things just did not click. I looked elsewhere for tutorials as well. My wife and I also had our first 3 month old around so my brain wasn’t functioning 100%. Regardless, I could follow the Landmarks tutorial, but not really step out on my own. The words I used to describe Swift to myself were “too cute” and “nuanced” and other things like that. After watching the Stanford CS193p Spring 2021 Lecture 3 video, there was a 2 minute section that really cleared things up for me. My background is mostly C# with some Python so that’s where I’m coming from.

Shortening things up

At 1:33:43 in the lecture, Professor Hegarty is finished taking two completely reasonable functions and chopping out more than half the characters. The resulting combination functions exactly the same as the two larger functions.

Before:

func makeCardContent(index: Int) -> String {
    return "A"
}
private var model: MemoryGame<String> =
    MemoryGame<String>(numberOfPairsOfCards: 4, createCardContent: makeCardContent)

Middle:

private var model: MemoryGame<String> =
    MemoryGame<String>(numberOfPairsOfCards: 4, createCardContent: {(index: Int) -> String in
        return "A"
    })

After:

private var model: MemoryGame<String> =
    MemoryGame<String>(numberOfPairsOfCards: 4) { _ in "A" }

The theme of the code reduction is ‘taking out things that Swift already knows’ as well as the ‘if this is the last argument of a function, plop the function in its place’. Let’s examine that for a minute.

The last argument of a function thing is really an if-then that you need perform mentally while writing code. When learning a language, it isn’t particularly easy to figure out what’s going on when all the code snippets are already fully reduced. Maybe I missed a key page in the documentation, but this wasn’t made clear to me in any of the learning I attempted to do. It could also just be that I don’t understand how functional programming is supposed to work.

That same code in C# (at least for the versions I use) would be a lot more clear to read. Everything would be specified, unless you precede a variable with var, which indicates that you want the compiler to infer the type. Being able to decide is nice.

When does concise become confusing?

All that said, I still think “cute” and “nuanced” are appropriate for describing Swift (at least SwiftUI). It tries to be cute by cutting out thing where other languages just leave them in. The underbar (_) when you don’t need to specify an argument is another example of this. Why not just make every argument label optional unless specifically called out as necessary?

The other thing is the mix between Swift being a strongly-typed language as well as type inferencing. If it is strongly-typed, we should need to specify the type basically everywhere. Leaving out the types and letting the compiler inference them seems to work really well (I know the compilers are all much smarter than me) but it doesn’t help readability.

Conclusion

Are these valid criticisms? I don’t know. If a Swift expert wants to watch me (via screensharing) work on some basic cryptocurrency tracking app I have going for 30-60 minutes to answer my questions and help me learn Swift (I would pay $$$!), I would love that. Swift will make more sense the more I write it, I know that, but I’m left wondering if I’ll always have these thoughts. Beautiful Swift is indeed beautiful. I just need to figure out how to get there.