alt Hacker News> mountains of ceremonial code and unavoidably ugly syntax.
you... just described Swift, really :)
Also, all those features exist even if you don't use them all. Which makes the language complex, cumbersome, and makes its compiler slow, complex and brittle. A language shouldn't be a collection of one-off edge cases, and this has nothing to do with ideological purity
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I agree the language itself has gotten more complex, but for day-to-day productivity in terms of actually using it to write code, I don't think it makes a difference.
I've found writing Swift code very pleasant, but I've been doing it for ten years, so that helps I suppose. The biggest productivity impact for day-to-day use for me in the last few years has been the new concurrency model.
I dunno, with a handful of exceptions I'm still mostly writing Swift the same way I did 5+ years ago. Unless you're using SwiftUI, new features haven't changed a whole lot in real world use.
Whatever the case, I don't enjoy writing languages more obsessed with theory or design purity (like Kotlin) as much.