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Chris Lattner on Swift

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Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#41

Post by mikeash »

lstamour wrote: post #33
diminish wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or the decision has been made but it's not ready to be announced yet, for whatever reason.

Apple is notoriously secretive. They hate saying anything ahead of time if they don't have to. They could have committed (internally) to open sourcing Swift when they started on it four years ago, but they still probably wouldn't say anything until they day it happens. If they thought they could get away with it, they'd have kept the very existence of Swift secret until the public release, but they need feedback from third-party developers at this point.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#42

Post by seanmcdirmid »

siavosh wrote: post #5

Great to see the credit to Bret Victor and Chris Granger's Light Table. Apple's resources can really help move forward these new ideas of what an IDE can be. If Swift is successful, a whole generation of young developers will use and improve on these ideas. Very exciting to see what happens.

Why do Bret V and Chris G get all the credit for something invented in the 90s? E.g. Steering programs with time travel (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.33....).

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#44

Post by jonathanedwards »

siavosh wrote: post #5

Great to see the credit to Bret Victor and Chris Granger's Light Table. Apple's resources can really help move forward these new ideas of what an IDE can be. If Swift is successful, a whole generation of young developers will use and improve on these ideas. Very exciting to see what happens.

Speaking of giving credit and new ideas, see this 20 year old work: http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Lieberary/ZStep/ZStep.html

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#45

Post by lispm »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #42
siavosh wrote: post #5

Great to see the credit to Bret Victor and Chris Granger's Light Table. Apple's resources can really help move forward these new ideas of what an IDE can be. If Swift is successful, a whole generation of young developers will use and improve on these ideas. Very exciting to see what happens.

Why do Bret V and Chris G get all the credit for something invented in the 90s? E.g. Steering programs with time travel ( http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.33.... ).

> The approach to steering described in this paper is implemented in our research prototype, which runs on Sun and Hewlett-Packard color workstations, using Lucid Common Lisp and the Garnet user interface development system [Myers et al. 1990].

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#46

Post by mikeash »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #40
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.

Sometimes the occasion arises where it's useful to look at the assembly language being generated by your compiler.

The vast majority of developers I know completely freak out at the idea. I might as well suggest that they deadlift a car.

A few take it calmly, but don't really grasp what the stuff does or what it means.

I can probably count on one hand (maybe two?) the number of developers I know who can actually do something useful in that situation.

And that's just assembly language. Not even machine code, let alone actual hardware.

Most developers don't understand what goes on below wherever they work, and that's how it's been for a very long time.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#47

Post by mikeash »

melito wrote: post #34
necubi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's bizarre how focused programmers are on syntax.

It seems like half the comments about Swift have been comparing it to languages which it superficially resembles at the syntax level. And the other half of the comments are along the lines of, "I can't stand Objective-C's brackets, this looks much better."

It's like that scene from The Matrix: "I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head." I'd have expected experienced programmers to have reached that point long ago.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#48

Post by cespare »

bsdetector wrote: post #21
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.

On the other hand by keeping it secret and internal they avoided making bad decisions due to defensiveness and stubbornness. An example of this is Go; they don't actually take input from outsiders (generics) and when they have had to give in to outside ideas they implement it poorly just to be different (exceptions as panic). They would rather people put in a no-op printf to avoid the unused package error rather than…

> On the other hand by keeping it secret and internal they avoided making bad decisions due to defensiveness and stubbornness.

That is a non-sequitur.

The rest of your comment appears to be low-grade trolling.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#49

Post by castis »

enraged_camel wrote: post #35

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?

If you're going to let it get to you that much, you may want to step back a tad.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#50

Post by nostrademons »

mikeash wrote: post #47
melito wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's bizarre how focused programmers are on syntax. It seems like half the comments about Swift have been comparing it to languages which it superficially resembles at the syntax level. And the other half of the comments are along the lines of, "I can't stand Objective-C's brackets, this looks much better." It's like that scene from The Matrix: "I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head." I'd…

Wadler's Law: "In any language design, the total time spent discussing a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to the power of its position:

  0. Semantics
  1. Syntax
  2. Lexical syntax
  3. Lexical syntax of comments"
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