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The author lost me on "the language is very javascript like". His view on programming languages design is highly superficial. I can't take seriously the rest of his thoughts.
Lock-in? This argument - which we've heard before - makes the assumption that a programmer can only know one language at a time. I get that some folks are fearful of change. You're in the wrong industry, then.
On the other hand, I've never heard of anyone using their ObjC code from iOS app for Android one (by transpiling to Java or building ObjC code as a native library) or vice versa, so I guess this point is probably mostly moot. Except for the rant comes from a GNUstep developer, where ObjC is a language of choice, too (and Swift is supposedly unavailable, at least it's the case at the moment).
Will Swift be open source? That's the core question. In the 2000's, Flash was gaining a ton of popularity on the web, and Macromedia was recently bought by Adobe. They had just developed a new programming language, ActionScript, which was dynamic and object-oriented and offered an interactive developer playground. For early web developers like me, it was seductive and simple and more powerful than other state-of-the-…
ActionScript 3 was open source. - It was based upon ECMAScript 4. - The ActionScript code was open source, and the actual reference code for ECMAScript 4. - The JIT runtime of ActionScript 3 was open sourced (Tamarin) and "donated" to Mozilla to use as the basis for a faster JS runtime. Also, your comparison of Flash with Apple's Cocoa/OS platform frankly makes no sense. The situation is vastly different. Swift is in…
Will Swift be open source? That's the core question. In the 2000's, Flash was gaining a ton of popularity on the web, and Macromedia was recently bought by Adobe. They had just developed a new programming language, ActionScript, which was dynamic and object-oriented and offered an interactive developer playground. For early web developers like me, it was seductive and simple and more powerful than other state-of-the-…
ActionScript 3 was open source. - It was based upon ECMAScript 4. - The ActionScript code was open source, and the actual reference code for ECMAScript 4. - The JIT runtime of ActionScript 3 was open sourced (Tamarin) and "donated" to Mozilla to use as the basis for a faster JS runtime. Also, your comparison of Flash with Apple's Cocoa/OS platform frankly makes no sense. The situation is vastly different. Swift is in…
The author lost me on "the language is very javascript like". His view on programming languages design is highly superficial. I can't take seriously the rest of his thoughts.
Seriously, does his extent of looking at the language end at the "var" keyword?!?
It's turtles all the way down!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can write Objective C on Linux.
Yet the argument is pretty much moot since the Obj-C you write for iOS apps is locked to iOS/OSX because of Cocoa. In that regard nothing changes for developers of these platforms - they just have one more language choice now.
Beyond UI, I actually have used my Objective-C data models from an iOS app on Linux. There is no need for Cocoa there. Objective-C code transitions quite well at that level.
That said, I do agree that it is really not a big deal for the vast majority of developers.
Will Swift be open source? That's the core question. In the 2000's, Flash was gaining a ton of popularity on the web, and Macromedia was recently bought by Adobe. They had just developed a new programming language, ActionScript, which was dynamic and object-oriented and offered an interactive developer playground. For early web developers like me, it was seductive and simple and more powerful than other state-of-the-…
- move Java to a more browser friendly position
- make Flash lighter, faster and easier to integrate on mobile
These were for feature phones, and any of the above were realistic and plausible (I did actual projects using each of the above)
Flash got killed because it was too mouse centric and there would be no bridge between mobile and desktop, thus denying any network effect fom the desktop. The API was good enough, there was a few open source compilers and the runtime was OK. Compared to native Java it was actually nice to use.
But when you see the iPhone or the android phones, there is no compelling reason to do a lightweight Flash app when the same can be done in JS for more or less the same effort (and the js would work everywhere). Access to native functions could have been a selling point, but even that, going the full native route would be more sensible.
TLDR;for me Flash was killed by js coming to mobile, more than anything else
IMO, Swift is the most interesting language that's obviously going to be around and popular in 10 years time. There are languages that could be argued as even more interesting, such as Rust, and languages that are even more obviously going to be around and popular in 10 years (C++, etc), but swift is the only language I see that has both.
An open source Swift will not make iOS apps much easier to port, though. The libraries and frameworks of iOS are a much bigger hurdle than the language. Not to mention the fact that there will probably be small incompatibilities between the Apple and the open source implementations for at least the first few years.
The author lost me on "the language is very javascript like". His view on programming languages design is highly superficial. I can't take seriously the rest of his thoughts.