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The Swift Programming Language

developer.apple.com

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Re: The Swift Programming Language

#861

Post by sriku »

tptacek wrote: post #102

I just skimmed the tour, and my impression is: Swift is a compiled, Objective-C compatible Javascript-alike with an ObjC-like object model, generics, and string interpolation. No exceptions. Based on LLVM and appears to inherit the same data structures as Cocoa apps (Dictionaries, Arrays, &c). It feels very lightweight, sort of like an analog to what Javascript is in a browser.

> No exceptions.

This is a big shift. With such a rich type system (very Hindley-Milner .. even with "protocols" that feel like type classes?), there is no need for exceptions, for much the same reason that Haskell doesn't have exceptions in the core language, but only a monad. This would force error situations to be explicitly modeled in the types of objects returned by functions/methods. A good thing I think.

However, it does leave the hole of what if an ObjC framework you call on raises an exception? Can't handle it within Swift code? Another big omission in the manual is lack of mention of anything to do with concurrency, though "use GCD" is seen as the solution (Swift closures are compatible with ObjC blocks).

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#862

Post by oblio »

coldtea wrote: post #747
reuven wrote: post #739

I find it a bit sad that with all of the languages that already exist, Apple found it necessary to invent a completely new one -- and then make it proprietary. Why not use Ruby, or Python, or JavaScript -- or even Go, Rust, Clojure, or Scala? (Yes, I realize that the latter two run on the JVM, which would have been problematic in other ways.) Heck, they could have bought RubyMotion and made Ruby the high-level langua…

> Why not use Ruby, or Python, or JavaScript -- or even Go, Rust, Clojure, or Scala? (Yes, I realize that the latter two run on the JVM, which would have been problematic in other ways.) Heck, they could have bought RubyMotion and made Ruby the high-level language of choice for development. Because OBVIOUSLY none of them solve the problems they wanted to solve (interoperabillity with Objective-C, fast, native, IDE in…

I'm not sure if you're kidding or not.

IDE integration for a new language? They wrote it themselves. Do you think it would have been harder to integrate an existing language? Fast & native also also trivially solvable.

I don't know about interop with Objective-C, that's probably the hardest part from your list.

But complaining about IDE integration when they're also the creators of the IDE is... silly...

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#863

Post by briggers »

reuven wrote: post #739

I find it a bit sad that with all of the languages that already exist, Apple found it necessary to invent a completely new one -- and then make it proprietary. Why not use Ruby, or Python, or JavaScript -- or even Go, Rust, Clojure, or Scala? (Yes, I realize that the latter two run on the JVM, which would have been problematic in other ways.) Heck, they could have bought RubyMotion and made Ruby the high-level langua…

Apple likes to control the whole product as much as possible.

The iOS/OSX ecosystem is absolutely big enough to support an exclusive language (see Objective-C), and Apple chose to create a new language that matched their goals instead of adapt something they don't control and isn't ideal.

Makes perfect sense, and Swift was by far the most impactful announcement at WWDC.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#865

Post by return0 »

te_chris wrote: post #202
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 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

It really reeks of 80s. I 'd rather program in plain C.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#866

Post by anilmujagic »

CCs wrote: post #662
Udo wrote: 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 think everybody can see their own favorite language in it... and that's a good thing. For me it looks like Scala + a sprinkle of C++14 :)

Indeed, I also think it's most similar to Scala.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#867

Post by mmaldacker »

Karunamon wrote: post #502
unfunco wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fun once. It's impractical for someone editing the code later though, I don't want to have to look up the unicode character each time I want to remember it, and I don't want to have to copy and paste it either, it's better to stick with the characters available on a keyboard.

OS X handles some of this by assigning mnemonics to keyboard keys with the meta key (on mac keyboards, Option, or the "windows" key on the standard layout) held down. For instance, the registered trademark symbol ® is just option+r. ∑ is option-w. Diacritics are two-stroke combinations, to get é, you'd type option-e, which puts the ´ on the screen, and then type the e to complete the character. Some of them definitel…

except ∑ is an upper-case sigma which corresponds to s in the latin alphabet, so why not option+s ?

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#868

Post by hrktb »

josephjrobison wrote: post #605
Udo wrote: 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…

Is it realistic to try to dive right in to the 500-page book they provided without a computer science background, just HTML/CSS/PHP self-taught experience, to learn the language? Or should I take other steps first?

I think it's a good idea only if you execute code in parallel, following all the examples. Otherwise there's a lot of notions than already exist in Objective C that are glossed over and would be pitfalls for people new to the runtime.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#869

Post by [deleted] »

josephjrobison wrote: post #641
lugg wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just read the first paragraph and conclusions if the have them, of each chapter. This will give you a good idea of what's there when you need it. Then I'd jump straight into tutorials. Honestly skimming 500 doesn't sound horribly hard to me. I've done that a few times to pick up something new. As ap said you won't learn the language like that but you will have a good reference to go and learn from after the fact. Aft…

And is this the exact same language - http://www.cs.cornell.edu/jif/swift/doc/index.html

[deleted]

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#870

Post by tomp »

sriku wrote: post #861
tptacek wrote: post #102

I just skimmed the tour, and my impression is: Swift is a compiled, Objective-C compatible Javascript-alike with an ObjC-like object model, generics, and string interpolation. No exceptions. Based on LLVM and appears to inherit the same data structures as Cocoa apps (Dictionaries, Arrays, &c). It feels very lightweight, sort of like an analog to what Javascript is in a browser.

> No exceptions. This is a big shift. With such a rich type system (very Hindley-Milner .. even with "protocols" that feel like type classes?), there is no need for exceptions, for much the same reason that Haskell doesn't have exceptions in the core language, but only a monad. This would force error situations to be explicitly modeled in the types of objects returned by functions/methods. A good thing I think. Howev…

I disagree. I use exceptions a lot in OCaml. For example, when implementing a recursive type-checker, you really want to be able to abort (all the recursive invocations) quickly if e.g. you find an undeclared variable or a type error. Using an ADT would IMO incur an unacceptable syntactic and cognitive overhead.
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