Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chris Lattner on Swift

nondot.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 203 posts

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#51

Post by glibgil »

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?

Yes, you are the only one. Replace "guru" with "expert" and "ninja" with "expert" and continue reading. There are already no real ninjas in the world and soon there will be no real gurus. No one thinks twice when someone is called a marketing wiz (there are no real wizards any more). Language changes and metaphors using archaic terms are commonly introduced.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#53

Post by personZ »

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…

The only really innovative parts of Go are its concurrency support, which Swift seems to be completely lacking.

Worth noting that one of the greatest problems in software development is concurrency support and its ease of use/robustness.

It is a critical and growing issue.

In contrast, having or not having generics, optionals (in C# these are nullable types), algebraic data types (which in Go is interface, albiet minus the type set checking) make a marginal, vanishingly small difference in programmer productivity or application performance/stability.

99% of the articles about the profound importance of generics are people building nothing of interest for anyone, and it is exactly that vaguery of design that makes generics seem so important.

Concurrency, however, is everyone's problem. It is the modern programming problem. Nothing is more important.

And FWIW, all languages draw from each other, and of course they should learn from each other. It is very likely that Go influenced Swift in subtle ways, but it is obvious why that wouldn't be referenced.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#54

Post by mseri »

gress wrote: post #39
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And with those nice closures, generics, monadic patterns, ... They even have a nice way to introduce useful abstract concepts at lower level classes (not that they couldn't make it without... It's just funnier and with higher incentive if you can build ios apps out of it)

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#55

Post by eddieroger »

smackfu wrote: post #27
slaven wrote: post #3

It's amazing that Apple managed to go from hatching the idea in mid-2010 to releasing a fully working framework 4 years later, with tight IDE integration, huge amount of testing and compatibility without a single leak (that I've heard of).

It's not clear how much code is actually written in Swift so far, so I'm not sure how much testing/compatibility was required.

If they're willing to allow developers to release an app written in Swift when the beta ends, I'd say they're pretty comfortable with it in production. If Swift is really four years old already, who knows what components could be already in Swift. And it's not like Apple jumps ship overnight - iTunes spent nearly a decade as a Carbon app after introducing Cocoa.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#56

Post by Shebanator »

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…

As kryptiskt mentions in a separate comment below, its not that go's designers ignored language research. Rather, its that they took a decidedly minimalistic approach to language features.

What really surprises me is that Apple didn't put any concurrency features into Swift. Having a language with better block/closure support will certainly help, but imagine what they could have done with some additional work. Would have loved to have seen some support for channels and tasks a la Rust/Go/etc.

Edit: personZ's comment above says what I wanted to say, much more clearly.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#57

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#58

Post by m0nastic »

smackfu wrote: post #27
slaven wrote: post #3

It's amazing that Apple managed to go from hatching the idea in mid-2010 to releasing a fully working framework 4 years later, with tight IDE integration, huge amount of testing and compatibility without a single leak (that I've heard of).

It's not clear how much code is actually written in Swift so far, so I'm not sure how much testing/compatibility was required.

Not that it's particularly complicated, but they mentioned yesterday that the updated version of the WWDC app (which they released right after the keynote) is written in Swift.

I don't know if that means "entirely written" or some parts, but they at least called attention to it.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#59

Post by phaedryx »

cbrauchli wrote: post #52
scotu wrote: post #43

He does not have a beard. I'm very skeptic this language will be successful

I think the beard test is for OS developers.

Matz with a beard: http://www.rubyist.net/~matz/images/matz-beard.jpg

He grew it specifically as a response to the "beard test" for programming languages.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#60

Post by enneff »

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…

Wow, I'm not sure how to begin responding to that.

Go has taken a lot of suggestions from the open source community. Check the Go 1 mailing list discussions for examples. But panic existed before the opensource release and is not a substitute for exceptions, and nobody has actually proposed a viable generics implementation. The unused variable/package thing is a fundamental to the project's goals of working well at scale, and tools like goimports alleviate the pain (sometimes the answer is tools, not language changes).

Overall I'm pretty dismayed by your characterisation of Go as an open source project. We have a lot of great contributors from outside Google and your ignorant comments do them a great disservice.

Post reply on HN