He does not have a beard. I'm very skeptic this language will be successful
I think the beard test is for OS developers.
Chris Lattner on Swift
81–90 of 203 posts
Re: Chris Lattner on Swift
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 min…
Genuine question: what does Go provide in terms of concurrency that Swift + GCD doesn't?
I would argue that Go has it more "baked in."
But I'm actually curious as well. Given that Objective-C (and now Swift) have GCD, what language features are needed to bring concurrency up to par with Go?
I'm sort of reminded of what Microsoft did after Task Parallel Library came out with C#. People didn't pay attention too much to what MS was building until async/await came out (along with tooling support). But async/await built upon TPL. So it's probably a matter of time for Apple to do something similar on top of GCD, if they're going to do something. But I doubt it's going to look something like Go.
Re: Chris Lattner on Swift
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been seeing much the same from programmers invested in the Apple ecosystem who will likely be spending all day writing nothing but Swift within a year.
Lots of people are having a hard time understanding the difference between dynamic typing and static typing with type inference.
Definitely. I suppose it's understandable if this is your first exposure to type inference. Superficially it looks exactly like the "assign anything to anything" languages like Python or JavaScript.
Re: Chris Lattner on Swift
#84I wish Apple had selected a different name: https://www.ci.uchicago.edu/research-projects/swift
Name a letter or a word and there is some project out there that had it before. If you come to grips with this now, your adult life will be much easier.
Re: Chris Lattner on Swift
#85It'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).
Doesn't it use the same frameworks as Objective-C?
Re: Chris Lattner on Swift
#86I 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.
I agree but I feel like with swift it's kinda reaching an extent and it really doesn't push you toward learning any other layer. Swift + playground feels like the new dreamweaver to me. Either people are gonna write ugly code that shows them what they want to do or keep building quality apps, I don't know, I guess future will tell us. But I guess my main point was just that where I personally would try to reduce the gap between the different layers so we developers know what happens from A to Z (at least on the software side), the industry is clearly adding layer on layers such a way it's nearly impossible to control and understand the whole thing.
Re: Chris Lattner on Swift
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think it very likely Apple have all kinds of 1, 2, 5 and 10 year road maps for all their products (software and hardware). Given that almost all of them rely so heavily on Objective-C, I expect they've had a road map for that (and XCode and the whole tool chain) for a very long time. Given the plan is now to phase out ObjC and replace it entirely with Swift, I think it's extremely unlikely Steve didn't know about i…
He did say that it wasn't A major Apple focus until last year, when they actually got together and did all the end work.
Re: Chris Lattner on Swift
#88> I hope that by making programming more approachable and fun, we'll appeal to the next generation of programmers and to help redefine how Computer Science is taught.
I'll be cynical here: can this be done if the language ends up being restricted to apple devices?
Re: Chris Lattner on Swift
#89Earlier 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…
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 min…
> 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.
I think it's quite a stretch to say that people who have written articles about generics are almost never building anything of importance. The browser you used to post this comment makes extensive use of generics via C++ templates, which were well documented by their authors in order to fill a very important role (smart pointers for reference counted objects, for one).
Re: Chris Lattner on Swift
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which languages that can produce a high performance 3D game wouldn't be able to also produce a social media application?
C++ would be absolutely terrible for social media applications. There, the barrier isn't usually the speed but correctness and maintenance overhead.
Is Objective C really that much better? If you have decent APIs/libraries, C++ would be just fine.