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The Swift Programming Language

developer.apple.com

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Re: The Swift Programming Language

#391

Post by bigtunacan »

I'm a bit surprised by this move. I see that there are some advantages to this new language, but Objective-C is not as unapproachable as the unwashed masses make it out to be.

If Apple wanted to add official support for a new language I would think it would have been a better move to use something that already has an established following and could potentially attract new developers over. Something like Ruby/Python/Lua would seem to fit the bill nicely.

We've already seen Ruby can be done successfully on Mac with MacRuby and RubyMotion, but it nevers get full support from Apple.

Adding an additional programming language that binds me only to Mac platforms doesn't give me a whole lot of incentive.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#392

Post by stonemetal »

tylermac1 wrote: post #369
dfc wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if Apple's goal was to get new devs into the iOS world, at least > from 10k feet, it's working They just announced Swift, at a conference for Apple developers, with live streaming that is only easily accessed from an ios device. I think it is probably premature to pop the corks and celebrate the efficacy of the get new developers initiative.

How else are they supposed to announce it? It's simply that, an announcement. People are talking about it now and there's info on the Apple site. I see this as a huge push forward for new developers.

The announcement was fine, it is the "its working" part that is odd considering it is less than a day old. Let's see if it actually attracts new developers before we declare it a mighty success.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#393

Post by angersock »

nlh wrote: post #37

I'm not even an iOS developer but this is by far the most exciting thing I heard in the keynote. As an amatuer/hobbyist programmer who's self-taught with Ruby, JavaScript, etc., the one thing that was keeping me from experimenting with iOS apps was Objective-C. I know I could tackle it, but it's been hard to take the plunge. I don't know much about Swift yet, but from what I've seen it looks very exciting. So if Appl…

I'm not really that impressed--it looks like a hodgepodge of ideas from ES6, Ruby, Go, and maybe Rust, with a bit of backend work done to let it work on their existing infrastructure.

I dislike that Apple has continued the special snowflake approach, that for some reason we as developers need to learn yet another different-but-almost-the-same language to develop for them, instead of just adding proper support and documentation for an existing language. Why not just let us use ES6, or normal C/C++, or Java?

But instead, now there's yet another language without great innovation that is probably going to be badly supported outside of the Apple ecosystem but still will have enough fandom to keep it alive and make life annoying.

At least Google had the decency to pick a language everybody was already using and use that.

EDIT:

I feel bad for all the engineers stuck in those pixel mines, not allowed to talk about what they're doing, doomed to reinvent things that are on the way out just as they come in.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#396

Post by kolev »

I'm super excited about Swift as Objective-C was always a barrier for me as I dislike it very much. This was the greatest news from Apple today, I hope to see compilers on other platforms as well soon.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#397

Post by mox1 »

ktran03 wrote: post #352
te_chris wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the hate. Yeah, syntax is unfamiliar, bu once I got used to it I began to really enjoy objective-c. Ymmv etc., but it's now one of my fav languages - though I guess this is mostly due to cocoa

I never understood what the fuss was all about either. If you know one other language really well, Objective-C should take a week or two to get use to. To understand all the design patters, apple HIG, XCode, profiling, libraries, debugging, app submission, etc, these combined is where youll sink your time to learn iOS development. Imo, Objective-C is the easy part.

I recently translated one of my Apps from Android to iPhone.

I had 0 objective-C experience, but I made it work. It was a bit of a frustrating experience. Many times I found myself writing Objective-C boilerplate-ish code that I had 0 clue what it was doing, considering this is a hobby / for fun project I just wanted it working.

It's not easy to google the answer to, "Why did I just add this new keyword after this colon in this random .h file.."

I didn't want to spend the next month reading Objective-C for beginners, I know what a for loop is, I also know what constructors are. I just wanted to use the language.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#398

Post by mtrimpe »

dfc wrote: post #358
nlh wrote: post #37

I'm not even an iOS developer but this is by far the most exciting thing I heard in the keynote. As an amatuer/hobbyist programmer who's self-taught with Ruby, JavaScript, etc., the one thing that was keeping me from experimenting with iOS apps was Objective-C. I know I could tackle it, but it's been hard to take the plunge. I don't know much about Swift yet, but from what I've seen it looks very exciting. So if Appl…

> So if Apple's goal was to get new devs into the iOS world, at least > from 10k feet, it's working They just announced Swift, at a conference for Apple developers, with live streaming that is only easily accessed from an ios device. I think it is probably premature to pop the corks and celebrate the efficacy of the get new developers initiative.

Well; based on the promise of immediate inclusion in the app store and a very well thought out book about the language available for free I'd say they're doing rather well so far already.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#399

Post by nardi »

anon1385 wrote: post #380
nardi wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this feature, but it's not quite the Maybe Monad, which lets you assemble a sequence of (possibly failing) statements together, and fail the whole sequence if any of the parts fails (without if-statements or switching of any kind).

'Optional Chaining' sounds like it lets you join thing together to some extent: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...

Oh, cool! Straight out of CoffeeScript. Yeah, that's pretty much the monad instance of Maybe.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#400

Post by binarycrusader »

maaaats wrote: post #342
phaedryx wrote: post #241

First question that comes to mind: how open is this language? (I can't find any references to it)

Extremely closed, at least at the moment. Can't even read the language reference without Apple products.

You can actually read the language reference with a "standard browser":

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...

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