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Issue 74
Aug 03, 2021

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!

THIS WEEK'S BLOG POST
Swift's concurrency changes introduced a lot of new concepts. Apart from async-await and actors, there are also async let's that allow you to combine multiple async functions in a single await.

TWEET OF THE WEEK
The fact that this tweet has so many likes and RTs tells us that we need a little change in Xcode. It might not be too late, as we’re still in beta land. Let’s see where this goes!

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CURATED FROM THE COMMUNITY

CODE
Vincent Pradeilles shows us how SwiftUI nicely works together with Swift’s latest concurrency changes covering async-await. Worth a watch if you’re excited about this!
We might not all need this, but if you do, you’re happy to find this article by Filip Nemecek. The API is relatively simple but might be hard to find when you need it!
I remember this being one of the features that missed early days: scrolling control. Keith Harrison shows how you can use ScrollViewReader today to gain control over scrolling positions.
Even though this attribute hasn’t gone through Swift Evolution just yet, I enjoyed reading this article by Five Stars Blog. It gives insights into how to have backported methods for SwiftUI on older OS in Xcode 13.
Another article by Five Stars Blog inspired me. You might not have realized you were using code that was marked with this @warnunqualifiedaccess attribute. It can be a useful touch to SDK code or regular methods in your app to prevent hard-to-find bugs.
If you’re like me, you can’t get enough of the new concurrency changes. Andy Ibanez takes us through detached tasks which - it’s in the name - are detached from any parent and run on their own.

ACCESSIBILITY
An article encouraging you to make fewer items accessible, that’s right! For good reasons. Let Rob Whitaker explain how you can improve navigation using accessible elements of your app by carefully picking which items to make accessible.

XCODE
It’s a feature that exists for a while, but you might not be aware. Sarun W. helps you fix those grammar mistakes in your code!
If you’re exploring DocC, you’re likely also exploring how to host these archives of Swift documentation. Joseph Duffy explored several options like Vapor middleware and Apache and summarised his learnings.

UX
Building apps is not only about writing quality code. UI decisions can have a huge impact on outcome results. This case study inspired me and demonstrates a certain mindset you can apply when making design decisions.

SWIFTLEE JOBS
SoundCloud is the world’s leading audio platform, allowing everyone to share and discover unique content anywhere, anytime, on mobile and on the web. We are now looking for a technical...
Stream, a high-growth startup focused on Chat and Feeds, is hiring a Senior iOS SDK Architect to help build the future of their native iOS SDK. Join the team in...
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