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Swift – observations from Rust’s original designer

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71–80 of 88 posts

Re: Swift – observations from Rust’s original designer

#71

Yeah, that's all good. But why call people who understand that programming environments should not be opaque (and not violate elementary laws of design by obscuring readings of system's state) "livecoding nerds"? Really, why? :)

Perhaps because he doesn't see 'nerd' as pejorative.

Re: Swift – observations from Rust’s original designer

#72
post #66
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only have to be a paid developer to get the beta of XCode; once it comes out of beta, it'll be available on the Mac App Store for free. That said, it'd be nice to see Swift get open sourced at some point.

I'm afraid that it's going to be tied too tightly to the Cocoa Runtime to make opening the language up feasible without also opening Cocoa up.

You're thinking of the Objective-C runtime, which in fact is opensource: http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/objc4/objc4-551.1

Re: Swift – observations from Rust’s original designer

#73

Yeah, that's all good. But why call people who understand that programming environments should not be opaque (and not violate elementary laws of design by obscuring readings of system's state) "livecoding nerds"? Really, why? :)

Perhaps because he doesn't see 'nerd' as pejorative.

Well, me neither. :) Although it looks a little bit suspicious in the text. But what's the relation between 'not throwing crucial design principles out of the window this time' (by not creating opaque, contrived and state-hiding system because tradition seems to approve it) and 'Live Coding' (where people see process of writing code in real-time as a part of artistic performance)?

Re: Swift – observations from Rust’s original designer

#74
post #29
post #13

I hope ideas will flow the other way too, and Rust adopts some sugar from Swift. I find `if let concrete = optional` sooo much nicer than `match optional { (concrete) => , _ => {} }`. Rust has solid semantics that covers more than Swift. OTOH Apple has put their UX magic into the language's syntax. Some syntax shortcuts, like `.ShortEnumWhenInContext` are delightful. The two combined will be the perfect language ;)

Funny how this just falls out of JS (in CS): if concrete = optional call concrete

That's a bad idea if "optional" is a number, a boolean or a string.

Re: Swift – observations from Rust’s original designer

#75
post #60

"Protocols get to play double duty as either concrete types (in which case they denote a reference type you can acquire with as from any supporting type) and as type constraints on type parameters in generic code. This is a delightful convenience Rust stumbled into when designing its trait system and I'm glad to see other languages picking it up. I'm sure it has precedent elsewhere." - C# again. PS: Apple says "Swift…

Haskell has it for its type classes in the form of existentials[1] too:

  forall a. SomeClass a => a
in Haskell is quite similar to

  &SomeTrait
in Rust.

[1] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Existential_type

Re: Swift – observations from Rust’s original designer

#76
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that there is much question of replacing Rust when it isn't in use except as an unstable experiment with a lot of interest. You could replace Rust with outright vaporware.

Rust is not vaporware under any reasonable definition of that word; there is plenty of Rust there to run. It is not stable yet, to be sure; but there are plenty of people happily using it, some even in production.

The person you replied to did not say that Rust is vaporware.

At worst, it says that Rust's toehold is tenuous enough that even vaporware could replace it. I don't agree with that, but I can understand the sentiment. Think "knocked back with a feather".

Re: Swift – observations from Rust’s original designer

#77
A lot of the features allegedly inspired by C# actually come directly from Objective-C. It's a decent discussion (I also skimmed the manual front to back after the presentation) but it's sad the writer appears ignorant of how advanced a language Objective-C is/was, especially since it significantly predated C++, let alone Java and C#.

Re: Swift – observations from Rust’s original designer

#78

A lot of the features allegedly inspired by C# actually come directly from Objective-C. It's a decent discussion (I also skimmed the manual front to back after the presentation) but it's sad the writer appears ignorant of how advanced a language Objective-C is/was, especially since it significantly predated C++, let alone Java and C#.

Sure, but can you explain which features rather than leaving off at the author is "ignorant".

Are there features in Objective-C available now that weren't present back in the early days? Perhaps this is what the author means? Has Objective-C drawn inspiration from newer languages such as C# or Java?

Re: Swift – observations from Rust’s original designer

#79

A lot of the features allegedly inspired by C# actually come directly from Objective-C. It's a decent discussion (I also skimmed the manual front to back after the presentation) but it's sad the writer appears ignorant of how advanced a language Objective-C is/was, especially since it significantly predated C++, let alone Java and C#.

According to Wikipedia, both C++ and Objective-C "appeared in" 1983. I otherwise share your sentiment.

Re: Swift – observations from Rust’s original designer

#80
post #11
post #3

He seems to generally like it -- similar to Rust in a lot of ways, but a little higher-level, which is appropriate for its intended uses (iOS and OS X apps). He nor I seem to think that it can replace Rust (especially if they don't open it up!), but it definitely seems like a compelling option. EDIT: Does anyone know if it's possible to try it without a paid iOS / OS X dev license? I'd especially like to try the play…

You only have to be a paid developer to get the beta of XCode; once it comes out of beta, it'll be available on the Mac App Store for free. That said, it'd be nice to see Swift get open sourced at some point.

That's their hope - after 1.0, they want to open-source it.
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