Researchers have achieved data rates as high as 424Gbit/s across a 53-km turbulent free-space optical link using plasmonic modulators—devices that use special light waves called surface plasmon polaritons to control and change optical signals

This could be a line from Star Trek

Far as Swift’s syntax goes, I really like argument labels too, but it’s just that there’s SO. MUCH. SYNTAX. Lots of sugar, yes, but sometimes that’s part of the problem in my opinion, because it often adds to the syntactic and semantic “noise.” Also, there’s 98 keywords (more if you count eg. try, try! and try? as different keywords, and this count is missing eg. sending and other new keywords) – compare this to say Rust’s or or Python’s 35. Java’s got 68, while C++ also has 98 and it’s notorious for having way too many of them. And then there’s all the symbols – some of which have different meanings in different contexts.

It’s true that ARC only applies to reference types, but even with value types you can often get some fairly surprising performance problems due to implicit copies, for example in getters and setters – and the _read and _modify accessors that can sometimes help with that due to returning (well, yielding) a borrowed value instead of a copy aren’t meant for “public” use (which doesn’t mean many libraries etc. don’t use them, much to the consternation of core devs).

Swift is… not a great language. It’s got some promise but goddamn does it have a “designed by committee” feel to it; they just keep throwing on features like they’re going out of fashion and it’s getting ridiculously complex. Just the syntax alone is a bit of a nightmare – soooo many keywords and symbols. It’s also extremely hard to predict how well Swift code will perform, in large part due to ARC (automatic reference counting) memory management, which is a huge downside for game development. And don’t even get me started on the new concurrency stuff…

Just as a side note, it’s not purely an Apple project nowadays. They’re still the “project lead” but it’s not exclusively theirs anymore. Still, regardless of that, at least personally I really couldn’t recommend it especially to someone looking to get into game development.

That’s known as a ligature and they’re pretty common in many programming-oriented fonts, which usually have stylistic sets with different ligatures for different programming languages that you can optionally enable in your editor’s configuration. For example, here’s the stylistic sets the Monaspace font offers:

Personally I’m not too fond of ligatures so I never enable any, but many folks do like them.

Edit: and just as a side note, ligatures are super common in many fonts, you just might not notice them. Here’s some classic examples from the DejaVu Serif font, with and without a ligature:

"A".reverse() == "∀"

Where is your god now?!

More of a tragicomedy, really

Where’s your sense of adventure?!

Calling reverse() on a function should return its inverse

You’re no fun

Use a dynamically typed language and you won’t have to: just override the default reverse() method on strings like a Real Programmer!

Unintended consequences you say? Nonsense! What could possibly go wrong?

"E".reverse() == "∃"

I dint know many OO languages that don’t have a useless toString on string types.

Well, that’s just going to be one of those “it is what it is” things in an OO language if your base class has a toString()-equivalent. Sure, it’s probably useless for a string, but if everything’s an object and inherits from some top-level Object class with a toString() method, then you’re going to get a toString() method in strings too. You’re going to get a toString() in everything; in JS even functions have a toString() (the output of which depends on the implementation):

In a dynamically typed language, if you know that everything can be turned into a string with toString() (or the like), then you can just call that method on any value you have and not have to worry about whether it’ll hurl at runtime because eg. Strings don’t have a toString because it’d technically be useless.

Everything that’s an Object is going to either inherit Object.prototype.toString() (mdn) or provide its own implementation. Like I said in another comment, even functions have a toString() because they’re also objects.

A String is an Object, so it’s going to have a toString() method. It doesn’t inherit Object’s implementation, but provides one that’s sort of a no-op / identity function but not quite.

So, the thing is that when you say const someString = "test string", you’re not actually creating a new String object instance and assigning it to someString, you’re creating a string (lowercase s!) primitive and assigning it to someString:

Compare this with creating a new String("bla"):

In Javascript, primitives don’t actually have any properties or methods, so when you call someString.toString() (or call any other method or access any property on someString), what happens is that someString is coerced into a String instance, and then toString() is called on that. Essentially it’s like going new String(someString).toString().

Now, what String.prototype.toString() (mdn) does is it returns the underlying string primitive and not the String instance itself:

Why? Fuckin beats me, I honestly can’t remember what the point of returning the primitive instead of the String instance is because I haven’t been elbow-deep in Javascript in years, but regardless this is what String’s toString() does. Probably has something to do with coercion logic.

This is absolutely true, but it still seems to me that we’re throwing the baby out with the bath water when we just stick to extremely terse symbols for everything regardless of context.

Reading articles would be so much easier if they used even slightly longer names – thankfully more and more computer science articles do tend to use more human readable naming nowadays, at least.

Sure, longer names make manipulation harder a bit more annoying if you’re doing it by hand, but if you do need to manipulate something you can then abbreviate the terms (and I’m 60% sure I’ve seen some papers that had both a longer form and a shorter form for terms, so one for explaining shit and one for the fiddly formal stuff)

Of course using terse terms is totally fine when it’s clear from the context what eg. ∆x means.

Ah, I managed to completely miss the last part of the comment because I’m an eejit who can’t read good

In 2017 his name was mentioned as a visionary comparable to the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane (inventor of the warp drive) on a Star Trek episode set in the 2250s.

By a character who was explicitly evil and whose judgement we were not meant to trust, though

Because the only options are North Korea or whatever the fuck you’re doing, I guess

That still doesn’t mean that all Nazis just magically stopped existing. Sure, a lot of them were killed in the war, but way more of them weren’t

Oh yeah I was specifically talking about all these new technologies, not just incremental improvements on the existing ones. Hybrid organic cells have been promised for a long time and it’s not just a question of scaling etc., but that they have had serious issues that have so far meant that they were a complete non-starter for any actual real-world use. I didn’t look into this any further so I don’t know of Longi solved the stability problem, though, so it may be that they’re finally actually ready to even start leaving the lab