>is a higher-level of abstraction to display for humans
Am I missing something here? Who do you think is actually writing this stuff? Aliens?
I just want the first 5 characters of an input string, or to split a string by ":" or something.
I have plenty of apps where none of my strings _ever_ touch a database and are purely used for UI. I'll ask this again: Why break strings _globally_ to solve some arcane <0.0001% edge case instead of fixing the interface at the edges for that use case?
All this mindset has done is cause countless hours of harm/frustration in the developer community.
It's causing frustration because it's breaking people's preconceived notions about how text is simple. Previously, the frustration caused was usually to the end users of apps written by people with those preconceived notion. And there are far more end users than developers, so...
>Am I missing something here? [...] I have plenty of apps where none of my strings _ever_ touch a database and are purely used for UI.
Yes, the part you were missing is that I was continuing a discussion about a specific technical point brought up by parents' Dylan16807 and dotancohen. The fact that you manipulate a lot strings without databases or persistence/transmission across other i/o boundaries is not relevant to the context of my reply. To restate that context... Dylan16807's claim that length_type_#2 (counting human visible grapheme clusters) is all the information needed for i/o boundaries is incorrect and will lead to buggy code.
With that aside, I do understand your complaint in the following:
>I just want the first 5 characters of an input string, or to split a string by ":" or something.
This is a separate issue about ergonomics of syntax and has been debated often. A previous subthread from 6 years ago had the same debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10519999
In that thread, some commenters (tigeba, cookiecaper) has the same complaint as you that Swift makes it hard to do simple tasks with strings (e.g. IndexOf()). The other commenters (pilif, mikeash) respond that Swift makes the high-level & low-level abstractions of Unicode more explicit. Similar philosophy in this Quora answer by a Swift compiler contributor highlighting tradeoffs of programmers not being aware if string tasks are O(1) fast -vs- O(n) slow:
And yes your complaint is shared by many... By making string api explicitly confront the "graphemes -vs- codeunits - codepoints -vs- bytes", you do get clunky cumbersome syntax such as "string.substringFromIndex(string.startIndex.advancedBy(1))" as in the Q&A answer:
I suppose Swift could have designed the string api to your philosophy. I assume the language designers anticipated it would have lead to more bugs. The tradeoff was:
- "cumbersome syntax with less bugs"
...or...
- "easier traditional syntax (like simple days of ASCII) with more hidden bugs and/or naive performance gotchas"
Am I missing something here? Who do you think is actually writing this stuff? Aliens?
I just want the first 5 characters of an input string, or to split a string by ":" or something.
I have plenty of apps where none of my strings _ever_ touch a database and are purely used for UI. I'll ask this again: Why break strings _globally_ to solve some arcane <0.0001% edge case instead of fixing the interface at the edges for that use case?
All this mindset has done is cause countless hours of harm/frustration in the developer community.