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The post is about IBM's Swift implementation.
Swift, the language, is from Apple. IBM simply has built a bunch of tools for Swift and would like to sell consulting services around them.
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> this attitude to dog fooding isn't great. Apple isn't telling people to go use Swift on the server, IBM is. Apple is telling people to write iOS apps in Swift, which they are also doing themselves.
>Apple isn't telling people to go use Swift on the server, IBM is. I'm aware. This is the (humorous) point I'm attempting to make. IBM is adopting technologies faster then Apple. While Apple started it's life out as the Anti-IBM . Indeed it is still fulfilling this role. The (humorous) point being, their roles have in a way swapped.
So... what's the "elevator pitch" for Swift? It has anything interesting over Elixir or Go (well, go's feature is "lack of feature" but you know what I mean) or Scala or Kotlin? I know that iOS and MacOS desperately needed a modern language, and great for them that they have it now, but does the rest of the world need it?
I think the pitch is that despite static typing, it offers a lot of multi-paradigm high-level features while remaining elegant with fairly minimal syntax compared to other native static languages like Rust or C++. It automatically manages memory but without a stop-the-world garbage collector and goes a long way to opening a lot of flexible design options to any developer: it has great support for generic programming,…
RC is a stop-the-world garbage collector when the reference count reaches 0 in very complex data structures, which trigger a cascade of deletions.
Also it has issues with sharing data between threads leading to cache coherency contention and locks.
So... what's the "elevator pitch" for Swift? It has anything interesting over Elixir or Go (well, go's feature is "lack of feature" but you know what I mean) or Scala or Kotlin? I know that iOS and MacOS desperately needed a modern language, and great for them that they have it now, but does the rest of the world need it?
Swift is statically typed (Elixir isn't) with a good type system (Go hasn't) and doesn't run in a VM (like Scala or Kotlin). I don't know how good its concurrency is and on how many platforms it is available though. It also looks like the language itself is still not that stable which is in my opinion a no go.
You can also get it today with any commercial JDK like Excelsior JET.
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>Apple isn't telling people to go use Swift on the server, IBM is. I'm aware. This is the (humorous) point I'm attempting to make. IBM is adopting technologies faster then Apple. While Apple started it's life out as the Anti-IBM . Indeed it is still fulfilling this role. The (humorous) point being, their roles have in a way swapped.
I thought Apple was not one to usually adopt technologies quickly. That's been a (fair?) criticism of theirs for some time.
When I recently interviewed at Apple I was told my position would primarily be coding in Java, but the team would be open to other languages as the project progressed and needs changed. I asked if they would consider Swift. Then was told that Swift wasn't production ready in their eyes. (I didn't get the job) I guess every team is different, but this attitude to dog fooding isn't great.
But I don't see as much upside for enterprise development. Server side tooling and deployment is still TBD, reference counting adds non-negligible cognitive overhead vs GC in an environment where the downsides of GC matter much less. They will have to build a complete ecosystem of server-side libraries from scratch. And unlike on iOS/OSX, there are already a lot of good and much more mature alternatives.
I wouldn't be unhappy if Swift became a real contender on the server but it seems unlikely to me that it will.
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It's a systems language, and imo way more beautiful than c++.
Yeah but it can't replace C++. Swift was designed to make programming fun/nice not to replace C or C++.
Taken from https://swift.org/about/
"Swift is a successor to both the C and Objective-C languages."
Taken from https://developer.apple.com/swift/
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I'm wondering what makes swift ready for the enterprise ecosystem. It barely seems to meet the requirements of the "enthusiastic consumer" outside of Apple OS.
To be ready for the enterprise ecosystem basically means that you can sue someone if things go wrong, and you can buy support packages for enormous sums of money. IBM is saying that you can 1) buy bluemix swift from them, and 2) sue them if anything goes wrong - but since they have a great legal team, they probably got ironclad agreements ready to go.
Blame assignment isn't really about who made good decisions, or who worked hard, or any of that, it's a combination of how bad it went and who made uncommon choices:
common choice + failure = external blame (who could have seen it coming?)
uncommon choice + failure = it's your fault for doing it weird
common choice + success = great job!
uncommon choice + success = I don't trust you, but you might be a genius
Since hierarchical relationships function using blame ("responsibility"), making predictable decisions becomes more important than making good decisions at some depth of hierarchy.