Haikuing with Swift
Summing up Swift in seventeen syllables or fewer.
Haiku is a form of traditional Japanese poetry, made up of three phrases of 5, 7, and 5 on – roughly syllables in English – that draws some inspiration from nature.
Well, it turns out code isn’t the only kind of poetry we write: I challenged folks on Twitter to write a haiku about their experience with Swift, and was overwhelmed with responses. Here are some highlights, ordered by author:
let s be hello
— Ole Begemann (@olebegemann) December 7, 2018
pray tell me what character
is at index two https://t.co/baH5K0bu3u
protocol has self
— Russ Bishop (@xenadu02) December 5, 2018
or associated type
requirements. kill me.
Now I know Swift 4,
— Evan Dekhayser (@ERDekhayser) December 5, 2018
I’ll get back to writing apps.
Wait, here comes Swift 5.
Like Schrödinger’s cat
— Levente Dimény (@leventedimeny) December 5, 2018
Value at once some and none
Until force-unwrapped
Server-side Swift lives,
— Joe Fabisevich ????????????™ (@mergesort) December 7, 2018
But can you really use it?
4-0-4, not found.
For each, map, reduce.
— 〈flex::monkey〉 (@FlexMonkey) December 6, 2018
For type inference, deduce.
For optionals, guard. #HaikuingWithSwift
defer { ending here }
— John Haney (@johnhaney) December 5, 2018
let the beginning be here
the middle is here
the compiler could
— Harlan Haskins (@harlanhaskins) December 5, 2018
not solve this expression in
reasonable time
Type existentials
— Jeff Kelley (@SlaunchaMan) December 5, 2018
What does “higher-kinded” mean?
Just compile my app
They said it would be
— Graham Lee (@iwasleeg) December 6, 2018
Objective-C without C
But that is Smalltalk
Confusing error?
— Nick Lockwood (@nicklockwood) December 7, 2018
Delete your derived data
Now it's gone away
Assume, and you shall
— Anders Mannberg (@andersmannberg) December 5, 2018
unexpectedly find nil
wherever you look
Type safety is nice
— Jon Reid (@qcoding) December 7, 2018
But to get feedback from tests
I must wait. And wait
What if we could have
— Harshil Shah (@HarshilShah1910) December 5, 2018
Objective-C but without
the baggage of C
Bye NSCoding
— Jessica Thrasher (@jessicathrasher) December 6, 2018
Conform class to Codable
No more parse by hand
let this constant be
— tj usiyan (@griotspeak) December 5, 2018
unchanged no matter what I
write in future days
Wipe away the tears
— Mikey (@wookiee) December 6, 2018
I would like to do my job
but SourceKit has crashed
My kingdom for a
— V → V, Non-Trivial, Elementary (@CodaFi_) December 5, 2018
formal specification
of its semantics
If a monad is
— SantaStraws (@twostraws) December 6, 2018
like a burrito then where
do I add the sauce?#HaikuingWithSwift
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About the author
Paul Hudson is the creator of Hacking with Swift, the most comprehensive series of Swift books in the world. He's also the editor of Swift Developer News, the maintainer of the Swift Knowledge Base, and a speaker at Swift events around the world. If you're curious you can learn more here.
