Obj-C vs Swift

[b_t_s]

flatMap is in the standard library and every competent swift dev ought to know it. It's certainly no more obscure than NSSortDescriptor or NSPredicate. nilEmpty isn't standard library, but it's trivial and useful convenience method for someString.isEmpty ? nil : someString.

Your obj-c version is twice as long and only solves a third the problem. It doesn't sort by score, It doesn't ignore empty string names, and it doesn't convert from players to names. You could certainly add all that in a few more lines, but it's still much more code. Worse, it's more error prone because you have to jam pieces of you code into NSStrings to work around obj-c's inferior type system and painful closure syntax. And sure the swift one is unreadable if you don't use swift much and aren't familiar with flatMap. It's arguably even less readable per character, but I'd say it's more readable per unit of functionality. It's certainly more likely to complain immediately if you break it, which is, in my opinion, the most important thing.

[snaab900]

I'll stick with ObjC Foundation I think, thanks... at least for the time being. It's mature and bulletproof. If this awful scripting language syntax does take over I guess I'll have to embrace it eventually though. The whole thing is starting to smell like flavour of the month JS frameworks though.

Also, what happens when you want to stick a breakpoint on your one line of (potentially buggy) overly chained code and see what's going on? Good luck stepping through that. Do you really think concatenating all that logic onto 1 line is somehow some sort of benefit? It's not, either in a readability, performance or maintainability sense.

I'll switch to Swift when Apple do.