Chris Lattner

Thank you YouTube algorithm for this recommendation – Chris Lattner, the main author of Swift (amongst other things including LVM) chatting with Lex Fridman. Ignore the clickbait title. There is a good, brief discussion about the tradeoffs in value vs references types which is a topic I’ve been thinking a bit about this week.

Also some interesting comments about how a language delivers it’s complexity. Chris gives the funny example of what “hello world” looks like in Swift vs C++. Here’s Swift: Print("Hello world"), here’s C++:

#include <iostream>

int main() {
    std::cout << "Hello World!";
    return 0;
}

Especially when part of my interest is in exciting kids in programming, that’s a stark difference. Swift does go on to do the hard things – it’s used for native apps and has some of the great modern language features, but the simple things are easy. I am very happy with the idea of Swift (especially plus Playgrounds) being a smooth introduction to coding. Less so with SwiftUI – that gets complicated quickly when things go wrong.