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Chris Lattner on Swift

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Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#141

Post by superzamp »

gw wrote: post #11

It is nice that he mentioned Light Table. I would not be surprised if Swift ends up really benefitting Clojure adoption indirectly. I think one of the big hangups for newcomers is that, if you don't have experience with a Lisp, it's often difficult to understand the benefits of interactive development. If a large amount of new programmers become exposed to it, they'll be more open to other options that provide simila…

> if you don't have experience with a Lisp, it's often difficult to understand the benefits of interactive development

Also with Javascript and browsers' built in consoles you can have good times developing interactively

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#142

Post by topbanana »

dikei wrote: post #138
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?

Does it really matter ? While I think Swift is an amazing language, it would be much less useful outside the closed ecosystem of Apple. The same thing happened to C#, it never really took off outside Windows.

You could share code with Android and Windows Phone targets.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#144

Post by pjmlp »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #127
TillE wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Objective C really that much better? If you have decent APIs/libraries, C++ would be just fine.

No, objC isn't better. While it is fine for UI stuff, I wouldn't really want I build a web app with it. What I've read of Swift is more interesting.

Funny NeXT thought otherwise. WebObjects was a very good server platform.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#145

Post by Bogdanp »

PopsiclePete wrote: post #120
pjmlp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language has nothing from Go. Almost all Go features exist in languages since the early 80's, outside the C family.

Yeah? Interesting. Because all popular languages that I've used, up until Go, fail at concurrency at such a basic level, that it's almost as if their authors don't understand what concurrency is . Except Erlang. But then again, I said popular. C/C++/Ruby/Javasscript/Python/Java/C# - all fail miserably, utterly and completely at concurrency. What Go accomplishes with channels, goroutines and the "select" statement has…

So you're saying golang is web scale?

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#146

Post by pjmlp »

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.... ).

Because many young developers seem not to care to learn about our history.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#147

Post by bsaul »

prezjordan wrote: post #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?

To me, this is going to be the only thing that matters : dill this language be used for non-apple platform coding. I've been looking for a language just like that for a very long time on the server side for example.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#148

Post by kgarten »

gilgoomesh wrote: post #91
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).

The existence of a programming language named Swift under internal development at Apple had leaked. What it was for wasn't clear – it certainly wasn't clear that it would replace Objective-C.

can you give a reference?

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#149

Post by bitpew »

dikei wrote: post #138
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?

Does it really matter ? While I think Swift is an amazing language, it would be much less useful outside the closed ecosystem of Apple. The same thing happened to C#, it never really took off outside Windows.

It's true that C# is not as prevalent on non-Microsoft platforms as it is on Windows but there are a handful of mid-size to big multiplatform projects using C#.

e.g.

- Xamarin (multiplatform mobile apps)

- Unity3d (multiplatform games)

- Monogame (multiplatform games)

- Unreal Engine 4 (build system)

I guess Swift could fill the same gaps. I would especially love to be able to develop multiplatform mobile apps with swift since switching between ObjC and Java all the time is quite taxing.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#150

Post by tomp »

jayvanguard wrote: post #7

It looks like Rust was a major influence. It has been interesting seeing all these posts claiming Swift borrowed from _their_ language. Obviously there is a lot of feature influence between languages but it was interesting to see the ones he called out explicitly.

Personally, I see nothing from Rust in it (except what Rust took from other languages, like ML).
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