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IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

computerworld.com

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Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#221

Post by cyphar »

bluejekyll wrote: post #151
mattnewton wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more they are aware that there is still no stable abi and they know of breaking changes coming down the pipeline internally already.

People always demand a stable ABI, but I've seen very few use case on enterprise software delivered to the cloud where this is even necessary. Most people rebuild their software entirely prior to release, and deliver the entire package. Having a stable ABI doesn't do much to help this scenario. Linux doesn't have a stable ABI, hasn't hurt its success much.

> Linux doesn't have a stable ABI, hasn't hurt its success much.

Linux does have a stable ABI. And GNU'e libc tries to have one but it breaks often enough to be a concern (even with symbol versioning). You're conflating GNU and Linux here.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#222

Post by bluejekyll »

cyphar wrote: post #221
bluejekyll wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always demand a stable ABI, but I've seen very few use case on enterprise software delivered to the cloud where this is even necessary. Most people rebuild their software entirely prior to release, and deliver the entire package. Having a stable ABI doesn't do much to help this scenario. Linux doesn't have a stable ABI, hasn't hurt its success much.

> Linux doesn't have a stable ABI, hasn't hurt its success much. Linux does have a stable ABI. And GNU'e libc tries to have one but it breaks often enough to be a concern (even with symbol versioning). You're conflating GNU and Linux here.

You are right. I should have explicitly called out glibc. I've not had to work about direct Linux ABI interactions.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#223

Post by nailer »

DigitalJack wrote: post #212
nailer wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think laptops are the dominant computing device?

No. The context of the post is the one I replied to, which is often the case in a forum with threads, if that helps you out.

Glad you're aware of context, but apple jumping into new tech is responsible for their massive dominance of consumer computer computing which, you'll be pleased to be informed about, is mainly done on phones and tablets.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#224

Post by alblue »

euyyn wrote: post #192
stepanhruda wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? They don't have their own implementation...

I've heard they ported GCD to Linux, though. Would love for that to be open-source.

It already is, and IBM did do a lot of the work in porting it:

https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-libdispatch

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#225

Post by DigitalJack »

nailer wrote: post #223
DigitalJack wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The context of the post is the one I replied to, which is often the case in a forum with threads, if that helps you out.

Glad you're aware of context, but apple jumping into new tech is responsible for their massive dominance of consumer computer computing which, you'll be pleased to be informed about, is mainly done on phones and tablets.

Wow, you got me there. Apple ditched the floppy because they knew they could leverage the iphone 5 years later.

And because they have a phone, they could totally ditch the cdrom, because, like, who wants to use a CD on their phone, right?

And the ethernet jack! Man, I felt stupid having to plug my phone into the wall for the internets.

But that headphone jack. Their phone totally blazed that trail, getting rid of that. Wait, what? The Macbook dropped it in 2015?

Surely though, most people that have an iphone use a mac right? That's the leverage point! Well no, only about 10% of iphone users had a mac in 2015. Even if it was 1-1, what difference would it make? There's no leverage to be had. iphones work with windows last I checked, and the growing trend is not bothering to "sync" your phone with a computer at all.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#226

Post by veidr »

Razengan wrote: post #99
valarauca1 wrote: post #44

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.

> this attitude to dog fooding isn't great. The Dock and a few other components of macOS Sierra are written in 100% Swift, according to this year's WWDC.

That's interesting to here, because the rewrite apparently managed to re-implement the bug, introduced in OS X 10.8, where the Dock just randomly switches monitors for no apparent reason, every 12-24 hours, when you have 2 monitors hooked to a Mac.

(You can work around this bug by changing some of the defaults in the Mission Control pane of System Preferences... I think the "Displays have separate Spaces" setting.)

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#227

Post by nailer »

DigitalJack wrote: post #225
nailer wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you're aware of context, but apple jumping into new tech is responsible for their massive dominance of consumer computer computing which, you'll be pleased to be informed about, is mainly done on phones and tablets.

Wow, you got me there. Apple ditched the floppy because they knew they could leverage the iphone 5 years later. And because they have a phone, they could totally ditch the cdrom, because, like, who wants to use a CD on their phone, right? And the ethernet jack! Man, I felt stupid having to plug my phone into the wall for the internets. But that headphone jack. Their phone totally blazed that trail, getting rid of tha…

Have you read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html yet?

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#228

Post by cableshaft »

xenihn wrote: post #191
cableshaft wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at IBM for a position making Enterprise template apps for iPad working directly with Apple, and the main reason they said they passed on me was while I had a good amount of Objective-C experience, I had only dabbled with Swift on my spare time and had difficulty answering a couple of the questions they grilled me on in Swift. They specifically said I should have had more professional Swift experience wh…

Just curious, what were some of the Swift questions?

I don't remember most of the questions. I do remember being asked about basic things regarding optionals, about how it handles exceptions (Swift 2 had been announced like a week before the interview and changed how it did exceptions entirely to try-catch blocks, and I answered that, but then they were like "okay, how about in Swift 1", and I blanked, even though I put them into the toy app I was doing).

Another was something like "In Swift, what are higher-order functions?", which I somehow only heard that term a couple of times before and didn't have fresh in my head, despite using higher-order functions in plenty of programming languages (C#, Python, Ruby, even in Objective-C). That one was a case of knowing the concept but not the term.

I believe those two questions were the main ones that lead to the rejection, because I stumbled and didn't come across as confident there, but was otherwise pretty calm and answered the other questions well. I was in and out of there in 45 minutes, talked to one person who quizzed me on the names of UI objects on a given screen, and then the pop-quiz-style interview with two other people.

I also stupidly didn't show them the app I had partially built in Swift, even though I brought an iPad with me. I think I even mentioned it, and they're like "You have it here?" and I said "It's not finished..." and they just started asking me more questions. It was a working puzzle game, but some of the logic for clearing matches was wonky at the time and was visibly broken so I was hesitant to show it.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#229

Post by cableshaft »

fail2fail2ban wrote: post #211
cableshaft wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at IBM for a position making Enterprise template apps for iPad working directly with Apple, and the main reason they said they passed on me was while I had a good amount of Objective-C experience, I had only dabbled with Swift on my spare time and had difficulty answering a couple of the questions they grilled me on in Swift. They specifically said I should have had more professional Swift experience wh…

IBM advertises jobs yet when qualified people show up, they are rejected. Either it's a way to look like they are reaching out to the public to satisfy the government so they can then go hire outside the US; or it's a way to let insiders get those positions after the applying public are rejected, all IMO. When I was in there, 99.999% of the people I met came in through acquisitions, not applying for a job and getting…

A recruiter for IBM contacted me, actually. I didn't respond to an ad.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#230

Post by nicky0 »

WayneBro wrote: post #204
nicky0 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the Strings API is one of the best things about Swift. Strings are complicated and as Mike Ash says in that very article, "Swift doesn't sugar-coat it, but instead shows you the reality of what's going on. This can be difficult, but it's no more difficult than it needs to be."

Assembly is complicated too. I want it sugarcoated most of the time though. There are very few times when I need to drop down into assembly.

I don't accept assembly as a valid analogy.
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