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

Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)

heronsperch.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 60 posts

Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)

#51

Post by ytch »

thehme wrote: post #41

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…

But even Swift is lake of portability, so is Objective C. For example, It is hard to port iOS project in Objective C to android. So I think Swift doesn't change anything?

Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)

#52

Post by mantrax5 »

ytch wrote: post #46
pixelmonkey wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Open source is rarely the problem in the real world. But that's what you get from people who see divide the software world in "open" and "closed".

At one point or another your software needs to run on a piece of hardware. At least some of it won't be open, because as IBM learned in the 80s, you end up giving your hard earned lunch to your competitors.

Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)

#54

Post by pjmlp »

asveikau wrote: post #48

The 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 Ma…

It is too outdated.

Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)

#55

Post by thehme »

ytch wrote: post #51
thehme wrote: post #41

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…

But even Swift is lake of portability, so is Objective C. For example, It is hard to port iOS project in Objective C to android. So I think Swift doesn't change anything?

According to some articles while "there are many tools available to port Objective-C to Java i.e port an app from iOS to Android...porting Swift apps to Android will now become a tough task for developers."

http://thehackernews.com/2014/06/apples-new-swift-programmin...

Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)

#56

Post by tomelders »

I once worked in marketing for a big fashion brand. At the time, there were all kinds of reports about how manipulative and sneaky the marketing strategies of this company were, and how we employed all kinds of physiological trickery to make people but our stuff.

In reality, it's was a bunch of people batting around ideas in the hope we would come up with something that would make people like our products.

So I have a hard time believing someone at apple asked for a programming language that would "lock in" developers.

Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)

#57

Post by a-nikolaev »

tomelders wrote: post #56

I once worked in marketing for a big fashion brand. At the time, there were all kinds of reports about how manipulative and sneaky the marketing strategies of this company were, and how we employed all kinds of physiological trickery to make people but our stuff. In reality, it's was a bunch of people batting around ideas in the hope we would come up with something that would make people like our products. So I have…

Since open source is practically standard in programming language design nowdays, it is almost definitely Apple's intentional choice to make Swift closed. Also, they could take an existing open source language that is in the same category (OCaml(F#), Rust, Nimrod, Haxe ?). Being closed, prevents developers from cross compiling Swift for Android, and it will make almost impossible to write an alternative Swift compiler from scratch, since the language is not standatdized.

Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)

#58

Post by shadesandcolour »

We have no idea how this is different than Objective C. When was GNUStep first released? How much time was there between Cocoa being released and GNUStep being released? Swift has been out in the wild for a total of four days, there is no telling whether it will be open source yet. No one has made commitments one way or the other.

Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)

#59

Post by snowwrestler »

Isofarro wrote: post #29
pixelmonkey wrote: post #15

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-…

Flash dominated the Web more than Internet Explorer (even at IE's pinnacle). Somewhere in the mid 90% of visitors had Flash installed at it's peak. Open standards did not beat Flash. A bigger proprietary platform bully sent Flash to it's doom - Apple's iOS. Adobe's Flash was vulnerable because it had to seek Apple's blessing to be part of Apple's platform, and they were spurned. This is the lesson of being a sharecro…

Flash was already in decline before iOS had a significant impact on it. It was in decline for the same reasons Apple did not allow it on iOS: poor UI, terrible performance, and huge energy usage.

Both WebOS and Android had every intention of using Flash as a feature to differentiate themselves from Apple. If it were a matter of sheer marketshare, that should have been enough--Android has more customers than iOS.

But Adobe could never deliver a Flash runtime with acceptable performance, and even Android does not ship it anymore. Apple did not force them to drop it; it just wasn't good enough.

Re: Swift, and why it hurts you (from an GNUStep developer)

#60

Post by Intermernet »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #43
Intermernet wrote: post #14

Earlier 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…

What do you think the 'community' would do that Apple isn't able to? Languages are not meant to be designed by committee.

Apple can retain the core design decisions (like the Linux kernel) but the code should be open to pull requests and design improvements.

To use Go as an example, the entire Windows port was done outside of the core team, and is now a supported platform. The same goes for ARM, PPC64 etc. Also, huge performance improvements in core features such as channels were implemented by non Google employees.

If Apple open Swift, it can find hold in all sorts of niches they didn't expect it to, and can benefit from an entire community of developers who can fix the language's problems rather than be frustrated by them.

Post reply on HN