CryptoQuip Solver in Swift
OK, I've spent several hours with Swift, and it's pretty close to Ruby, but it's not the same in that the String is still a class, and that means that it doesn't have the duality that a string in Ruby - or clojure - has. This makes a lot of the functions in the CryptoQuip solver a lot harder.
Little things, too - like finding the distinct characters in a String. In clojure it's easy:
(count (distinct "rabbit")) => 5
and even ruby it's nearly as easy:
"rabbit".chars.to_a.uniq.count => 5
but in Swift, it's nasty:
func distinct(list: [Character]) -> [Character] { var buff = Dictionary<Character, Character>() for x in list { buff[x] = x } return buff.keys.array } let src = Array("rabbit") distinct(src).count
I did find a StackOverflow idea that does it, but it's a function that basically builds up a new list by adding one element at a time, and then checking before each add that the new element doesn't already exist in the collection. Since both these collections are Arrays, this is a linear search over and over and over again, and it's a mess.
I'm sure Swift has a ton of nice features, and it's quoted as faster than ObjC - which is nice, but issues like this make me realize it's a 1.x language and that the builders haven't had the time to go into the same use-cases that they have for other code bases, and fill in all these kinds of features that will make it a lot easier to write more complex systems.
For now, I'm content to hold off on more Swift work. It's just not where I'd like it to be.
UPDATE: I added in the function that I wrote, and it works, but Holy Cow! it's a mess. You can't easily make it one call:
distinct(Array("rabbit")).count
because you have to worry about the mutability of the Array, and that causes warnings in the code... it's just not ready for all the things you need to do. Soon, hopefully.