The author is completely right. When Apple announced that it will allow families to share music, books, etc., the first thing that came to my mind was: "Apple is trying to lock us in." I can already share my music, perhaps because I know how to do it, even if it is a tedious process, but I can see how this would keep users with Apple, if they don't know any better. Then they talked about swift and did not confirm it will be Open Source, so this also was a red flag for me that they are trying to further lock-down. When I think about it, this is how Apple became profitable and big, so it makes sense that it is looking for ways to stay in control, even if it alienates some.
Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)
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Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)
#42Will 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-…
AS3 was based in ES4 specification,"superseeded" by ES5.So ActionScript was in fact pretty opened and could have been today's javascript.
I dont think one can compare AS3 and Swift. In fact Microsoft had it's own implementation of ES4, Jscript.net.
> Flash is now relegated to a "second-choice" technology for web applications,
"Thanks to" Steve Jobs,that didnt want anyhting on his plateform he couldnt control.
IOs is a closed ecosystem,IOs has more developpers and apps than ever.There is nothing to learn here but the fact that they control their plateform,from end 2 end,and users keep on coming.
Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)
#43I'm not sure why Swift is controversial. Objective-C was all but lock in to Apple's ecosystem. If you want cross platform there are other options. Why shouldn't Apple try to optimise development for their ecosystem? Playgrounds are pretty impressive, as is the interoperability with Objective C e.g. dynamic translation between Objective C and Swift. I wish Microsoft had made it easier to mix and match F# with C#. Swif…
I think the problem is that Swift has a proprietary license and Objective C doesn't. I actually think this is likely to be the death of Swift in a completely different way; that of community support and tooling. It's much easier and more fun to write libraries, port to different platforms, and optimise compilers and runtime on open platforms. Flash suffered from this problem, Silverlight suffered from this problem, R…
What do you think the 'community' would do that Apple isn't able to? Languages are not meant to be designed by committee.
Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the problem is that Swift has a proprietary license and Objective C doesn't. I actually think this is likely to be the death of Swift in a completely different way; that of community support and tooling. It's much easier and more fun to write libraries, port to different platforms, and optimise compilers and runtime on open platforms. Flash suffered from this problem, Silverlight suffered from this problem, R…
C#'s implementation was closed source and tied to a totally novel (at the time) API suite in .NET. Swift has the advantage that it's tied to already known APIs, and that it can call into C/ObjC code, and they can call into Swift. At this stage it's probably too early to say whether Apple will or will not open source their Swift implementation. Again, pointing to a successful proprietary language, C# didn't have an op…
C# can call C, but not C++, except for COM interfaces (which have a defined external interface and mechanisms to get around the drawbacks of C++ libraries). To use normal C++ from C# you have to implement a bridge that's both C++ and managed code.
Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the problem is that Swift has a proprietary license and Objective C doesn't. I actually think this is likely to be the death of Swift in a completely different way; that of community support and tooling. It's much easier and more fun to write libraries, port to different platforms, and optimise compilers and runtime on open platforms. Flash suffered from this problem, Silverlight suffered from this problem, R…
C#'s implementation was closed source and tied to a totally novel (at the time) API suite in .NET. Swift has the advantage that it's tied to already known APIs, and that it can call into C/ObjC code, and they can call into Swift. At this stage it's probably too early to say whether Apple will or will not open source their Swift implementation. Again, pointing to a successful proprietary language, C# didn't have an op…
If you're arguing that C# succeeded despite not being open source, consider that Microsoft's tools at the time were EOL'd, so transition was forced for MS tech users.
Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Oh, and importantly, the Flash Plugin , the runtime, is not even open source today. Making the tooling open source is important and good, but also tends not to be enough.
So opensource a language maybe isn't a problem?
Regardless the openness of obj-c and swift, the iPhone runtime is still close-sourced.
And you can write your own swift compiler in LLVM, even if apple don't opensource it.
Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
C#'s implementation was closed source and tied to a totally novel (at the time) API suite in .NET. Swift has the advantage that it's tied to already known APIs, and that it can call into C/ObjC code, and they can call into Swift. At this stage it's probably too early to say whether Apple will or will not open source their Swift implementation. Again, pointing to a successful proprietary language, C# didn't have an op…
C# can call C, but not C++, except for COM interfaces (which have a defined external interface and mechanisms to get around the drawbacks of C++ libraries). To use normal C++ from C# you have to implement a bridge that's both C++ and managed code.
Ah, ok. I've seen it in code bases but never had to touch those sections (and it's not used in anything I'm developing, pure C# code for my projects). Thanks for the info.
Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)
#48The folks saying they don't see how it's lock in any more than objc need to think harder about what GNUstep is and what it means for the objc community. People already think of it as "Apple's language" and it's true that the vast majority of developments come from there, but I believe it to be more than that thanks to GNUstep.
When I learned objc more than a decade ago I was really just a kid, I could not afford a Mac or any extra hardware. But there was a GNU compiler. GNUstep had an open implementation of Foundation and AppKit. And the whole thing ran on Linux. So I was able to play with it. When I share this story with current objc devs, they give me blank looks. Mentally, they have already decided it is Apple's language and nothing more. I believe this is a form of blindness to the potential of objc. Why not objc on Linux? It exists today.
Hopefully Apple opens up the compiler, people port it to GNUstep, and the whole issue is moot.
Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)
#49I'm not sure why Swift is controversial. Objective-C was all but lock in to Apple's ecosystem. If you want cross platform there are other options. Why shouldn't Apple try to optimise development for their ecosystem? Playgrounds are pretty impressive, as is the interoperability with Objective C e.g. dynamic translation between Objective C and Swift. I wish Microsoft had made it easier to mix and match F# with C#. Swif…
GNUStep's Objective-C framework makes it easy to port desktop apps written in Obj-C over to other systems, and includes newer features like ARC, so I wouldn't say Obj-C locks you into AppleLand at all, at least for desktop apps.
From a slightly different angle, I personally think Obj-C is a very neat alternative to C++, and that it would flourish outside of the context of Apple's frameworks if more folks started to use it as such. While I'm happy that iOS development will be a little less difficult now thanks to Swift, it makes me sad to think that Obj-C might not get as much attention from newer developers who like the way the language extends C with Smalltalk-style OO and message passing.
Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)
#50The 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.
Reading through the description, plus looking at some example code reminded me a little of javascript (particularly in its es6 incarnation) too.
Me too but "the language is very javascript like" isn't the same as "reminded me a little of javascript".
Judging the language by it's syntax is a very superficial approach and then even the syntax shows a lot of things not present in JavaScript.