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Chris Lattner on Swift

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Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#31

Post by craigyk »

necubi wrote: post #26
dominiek23 wrote: post #20

Funny how he forgot to mention Golang somehow while that seems to be one of the bigger inspirations for the language.

I don't understand why people keep comparing Swift and Go, as they have diametrically opposed philosophies. As stated succinctly by Bryan O'Sullivan (one of the most prominent people in the Haskell community) on Twitter: "It's interesting to compare Swift and Go. One has caught up to the 1990s in language design, with the other firmly in the 60s." Swift includes many of the language features that have been touted by…

well in Swift I think concurrency is expected to rely on system libraries whereas in Go they are built-in and even have special syntax. If Swift ever gets a good macro system, though, I'm guessing one could create nice syntax to use system concurrency libraries.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#32

Post by thinkpad20 »

spike021 wrote: post #25

Another interesting thing to note is that because Swift really began in roughly mid-2010, Steve Jobs probably had his hand at least slightly in it (obviously not as a programmer). I guess my point being that there was likely some more specific reason for why it gained momentum later.

I dunno, it's possible but OTOH it's hard to imagine a guy like Steve Jobs, for whom (as far as I know) coding wasn't a primary concern, and who was dealing with cancer and much bigger fish in the i* products, being any more than tangentially involved in what would have been at the time a fledgling research language project. He was probably aware that it was happening, but I doubt that he played much of a role. Apple is after all a massive company filled with many smart people and who knows how many research projects.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#33

Post by lstamour »

diminish wrote: post #23
Arjuna wrote: post #10

Chris demonstrated Swift and Playgrounds at WWDC 2014: "I can build anything with Swift... from a social media application, all the way up to a high-performance, 3D game using Metal." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKMAV6owYh4#t=6436 He wrote this chapter (entitled LLVM ) in the book, "The Architecture of Open Source Applications": http://aosabook.org/en/llvm.html * * * On the general topic, I wrote this [1] a littl…

Did he mention anywhere Swift will be open sourced, the way LLVM has been? If not, why?

I find when Apple employees leave something important out, like licensing, it's because others haven't yet made the decision -- in other words, it's not final. I personally would have expected that if Apple were not making the code open source, they would mention its exclusivity and emphasize it as a training program for schools, etc. Realistically, it's just time -- like LLVM improvements or past work on Objective-C, expect everything up to the REPL as open source, but playgrounds and docs under proprietary license or completely closed would be my guess. If not now, some time in the future as .NET further open sources or if they want to encourage Swift as a JS competitor.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#34

Post by melito »

necubi wrote: post #26
dominiek23 wrote: post #20

Funny how he forgot to mention Golang somehow while that seems to be one of the bigger inspirations for the language.

I don't understand why people keep comparing Swift and Go, as they have diametrically opposed philosophies. As stated succinctly by Bryan O'Sullivan (one of the most prominent people in the Haskell community) on Twitter: "It's interesting to compare Swift and Go. One has caught up to the 1990s in language design, with the other firmly in the 60s." Swift includes many of the language features that have been touted by…

I think it's because Swift is so new only a small percentage of people have actually looked at the language spec.

First thing I thought of when I saw all the func calls, curly braces and beaks (->) was "this looks like in between Lua and Go"

After starting to dig into the book, it's pretty apparent that isn't the case

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#35

Post by enraged_camel »

I like Chris and what he has done, but...

>>The Swift language is the product of tireless effort from a team of language experts, documentation gurus, compiler optimization ninjas...

Seriously? What is a "documentation guru"? What is a "compiler optimization ninja"? I find language like this so distracting and asinine that I had to stop reading. Am I the only one?

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#36

Post by jevinskie »

diminish wrote: post #23
Arjuna wrote: post #10

Chris demonstrated Swift and Playgrounds at WWDC 2014: "I can build anything with Swift... from a social media application, all the way up to a high-performance, 3D game using Metal." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKMAV6owYh4#t=6436 He wrote this chapter (entitled LLVM ) in the book, "The Architecture of Open Source Applications": http://aosabook.org/en/llvm.html * * * On the general topic, I wrote this [1] a littl…

Did he mention anywhere Swift will be open sourced, the way LLVM has been? If not, why?

Uncertain. I hope they do.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.clang.user/492

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#37

Post by fataliss »

I feel like swift is really a good view on the future of programming. And it seems that in the future we have really two different kind of software engineers. As we make programming mainstream and easy, we will see some new people able to use langages like swift and dev good apps without having the slightest idea of what is happening underneath. We used to have at least a common background between software engineers but I think it gonna slowly disappear. Is it good or bad? I can't make up my mind yet, but I'm really considering more and more to go back to lower level langages as I feel like the upper levels are going to be crowded by young generations.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#38

Post by snowwrestler »

ibdknox wrote: post #16
joshdance wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly expected Bret Victor to do the demo on Swift after seeing the realtime playground etc.

fwiw, he had no direct involvement in it. http://www.quora.com/Did-Bret-Victor-work-with-Apple-on-the-...

I love that his account's URL is http://www.quora.com/Bret-Victor-1, because http://www.quora.com/Bret-Victor was already dedicated to his name as a topic.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#39

Post by gress »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #29
ibdknox wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that makes me sad is that because of their focus on secrecy, they're doomed to relearn all that we learned along the way. Having played with the swift playground stuff, just an hour long conversation could've made a big difference. Such is the way of Apple though.

When he said they hope to redefine how computer science is taught, that's a great goal (and to an outsider Swift looks great) but have they spoke to an academic about that idea? If they take the Microsoft approach of being nice to schools that'd be awesome - much better to teach kids Swift than how to use Office. So if they're talking about schools, there's probably some private ones that would be interested but it'd…

A load of colleges (e.g. Stanford) already teach iOS development. Swift and playgrounds will automatically chance how this is taught.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#40

Post by JoeAltmaier »

fataliss wrote: post #37

I feel like swift is really a good view on the future of programming. And it seems that in the future we have really two different kind of software engineers. As we make programming mainstream and easy, we will see some new people able to use langages like swift and dev good apps without having the slightest idea of what is happening underneath. We used to have at least a common background between software engineers…

"Underneath" just means "the level below where I'm writing". This has pretty much always been true, the way systems are layered. You write install scripts? Apps? Libraries? rendering engines? Drivers? OS? Firmware? Chip layout? You probably don't really know what goes on 'underneath' your layer.
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