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The Swift Programming Language

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461–470 of 970 posts

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#461

Is this related to Bret Victor's stuff? My mind was blown when I saw this video 2 years ago, and I can't help but see similarities here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII&t=10m42s

Bret used to work at Apple. I don't believe in coincidences. :)

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. Please. PLEASE don't be whitespace delimited! One of the prime examples I give for how HN/reddit has gone downhill was being downvoted by some clueless hipsters for suggesting that it would be easy to cross-compile from a whitespace-delimited language to a non-whitespace-delimited one. It's not some kind of huge fundamental divide in languages. For any non-whitespace delimited context free language, it should…

That does not sound like a practical solution for any language that offers a standardized toolchain or no explicit compilation as features. For those languages adding a homebrew translation step results in discarding unrelated features that the user might have wanted, and completely isolates you from intermingling your code with the rest of the language community. Syntax is not the most important thing in a language…

That does not sound like a practical solution for any language that offers a standardized toolchain or no explicit compilation as features.

Should be doable as an editor plugin.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#464
post #2

As someone who always disliked Objective C, I think Swift looks very promising. I'll check it out right away :) Software-wise, I feel these current WWDC announcements are the most exciting in years. Looking at the Swift docs right now, I can see many interesting inspirations at work: there's some Lua/Go in there (multiple return values), some Ruby (closure passed as the last argument to a function can appear immediat…

I really don't see the Golang influence at all. The multiple- return- value semantic is closer to Ruby's than to Golang's; you're returning a tuple, which happens to have natural syntax in the language. Defining Golang features that don't exist in Swift: - Interface types with implicit adoption (Swift takes explicit protocols from ObjC) - Error types - Relatedly, the "damnable use requirement" and its interaction wit…

This comment surprises me. It's factual but it's not really a response to an actual claim I made. Did you really perceive that I alleged an extreme similarity to Go in my comment? If so, it certainly wasn't intentional. I just said certain features reminded me of different languages, I didn't mean to assert these languages are actually incorporated into Swift.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#465

Why is this platform not JavaScript based (so we can leverage the largest ecosystem in the world) or Python based or anything-else-that-exists based? In other news, has Android killed iOS yet so we can stop worrying about Apple? Can't happen soon enough.

If you take a look at Swift, a lot of the different constructs are implemented similar to how they would be in languages like JS or Python.

I think that's my point. Why not JavaScript then?

The only reason I can see is vendor lock-in.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#466
post #49

Maybe I'll pickup iOS dev, do you still have to have an mac to dev?

You do need to have a Mac to do dev, although you can go the Hackintosh route. I just built one using tonymac86's guide. There are a few gotchas, but it just basically works, and can be a good way to get started without buying something brand new.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#468
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it inspired by Braid or the work of Bret Victor at http://worrydream.com ?

Bret Victor admitted at some point to being inspired by playing Braid.

I posted this elsewhere in this thread: http://vimeo.com/36579366

Bret Victor worked at Apple for a time as well.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#469
post #358
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.

As someone wise mentioned to me, Objective-c was 20% of the problem and Apple's silly rules and controls around app distribution are the other 80%. As someone who had their app available in the app store for nearly 8 months including 3 approved updates before being (seemingly) arbitrarily rejected, I feel the pain of that other 80%.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#470
post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. Please. PLEASE don't be whitespace delimited! One of the prime examples I give for how HN/reddit has gone downhill was being downvoted by some clueless hipsters for suggesting that it would be easy to cross-compile from a whitespace-delimited language to a non-whitespace-delimited one. It's not some kind of huge fundamental divide in languages. For any non-whitespace delimited context free language, it should…

If the solution for a feature intended to save time and reduce hassle ends up being "write and maintain your own compiler extension" it's a bad feature. Period. I'm not a fan of whitespace delimiting or type inferencing because while they seems like they save you time and effort, I've found that in the long run you end up spending more time debugging your indentations here or type declarations there than you would ha…

If the solution for a feature intended to save time and reduce hassle ends up being "write and maintain your own compiler extension" it's a bad feature. Period.

Note that your contextual value of "save time and reduce hassle" is mostly programmer dependent.

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