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Chris Lattner on Swift

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Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#191

Post by jroesch »

EpicEng wrote: post #183
ChikkaChiChi wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it does matter. I have little to no interest in Swift if it's walled off into the Apple infrastructure. I would be very interested if it was opened up and available for Linux.

If there is a standard available then it doesn't matter so much. With the a spec anyone may write their own implementation. Of course, will they becomes the question then, and whether or not people will adopt it on non-Apple platforms.

That is a nice view in theory, but doesn't mean much in reality, even if they release a spec who is going to be able to build an implementation to compare. It will end up like GNUStep. Even languages that are open like Python have trouble maintaining language compatibility across multiple versions. Written specs are also riddled with ambiguities and implicit assumptions which make the creation of a "perfect" clone very hard.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#193

Post by jiaweihli »

lcnmrn wrote: post #158
jiaweihli wrote: post #70

I'm not sure if it's XCode / playground acting up, but array equality is broken for me: `[1, 2, 3] == [1, 2, 3]` returns false. This seems to contradict the core declarations though: /// Returns true if these arrays contain the same elements. func == (lhs: T[], rhs: T[]) -> Bool Works alright for dictionaries. Is there a bug tracker for Swift anywhere to report this? Edit: Whoops, copied wrong declaration. Contiguous…

var one = [1, 2, 3] var two = [1, 2, 3] one == two That's because Swift checks for safety first (variable declaration).

Can you explain what you mean by `checks for safety first (variable declaration)`?

This issue only seems to affect arrays. Strings, numbers, and dictionaries are fine.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#194

Post by enneff »

bsdetector wrote: post #111
enneff wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I'm not sure how to begin responding to that. Go has taken a lot of suggestions from the open source community. Check the Go 1 mailing list discussions for examples. But panic existed before the opensource release and is not a substitute for exceptions, and nobody has actually proposed a viable generics implementation. The unused variable/package thing is a fundamental to the project's goals of working well at s…

I realize I'm in the Lion's Den. I feel that if you stepped outside the Google employee and Hacker News bubble you would see Go stubbornly refusing to have modern features, as I do. I've been programming for 30 years and have written code that is in every Linux distro, and yes I did read the Go mailing list occasionally in the early days. But if it makes you feel better to call my opinions ignorant then I hope that's…

I wasn't calling your opinions ignorant. I made several factual corrections about your post. You also made further incorrect statements about the development timeline of go (dsymonds corrected you there). No offense was intended, but in general I'm of the opinion that you should get your facts straight when criticising something publicly.

Also I've gotta laugh at "lions den". I've been reading HNers (like yourself) broadly condemn Go for nearly five years.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#195

Post by coldtea »

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?

>I'll be cynical here: can this be done if the language ends up being restricted to apple devices?

Sure it can. Students and school-children have been taught (and inspired) with proprietary systems and languages for ages.

Sure, it might not get to Windows or Linux users, but it still can reach tens of millions of kids and even universities (e.g Stanford already offers a well known iOS course with Objective-C).

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#196

Post by coldtea »

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…

>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.

You added "popular" now, to deflect from what he said: that those features already existed outside of Go. If a feature exists for 20+ years, having it in your language is not a sign that you "copied it" from a 5 year old language.

Not to mention that he also said "almost all" features, and was replying in the context that Swift copied Go. In that context Go's concurrency is irrelevant, since Swift doesn't have the same mechanisms.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#197

Post by coldtea »

personZ wrote: post #106
pcwalton wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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++ tem…

I think it's quite a stretch to say that people who have written articles about generics I said 99%. The vast majority of language observations online are language tourists, and the observations are seldom practical or rational, but instead are of the "in kicking the tires and making nothing in practical, here are my thoughts". Those sorts of posts dominate. Generics have a place, but their importance is...overstated…

Well, I have written big projects in other languages, and I wouldn't go back to a language without generics.

Don't know where you got the arbitrary "99%" statistic from.

It's not like generics are some novel, marginal concept. It's 2014 already.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#198

Post by thehme »

rsynnott wrote: post #178
thehme wrote: post #176

Swift "greatly benefited from the experiences hard-won by many other languages in the field, drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list." I have been wondering if in fact this language will be Open Source, since it is said to have taken from other programming languages, some of which are Open Source, yet the decision to make it Open Source has not been made?…

In general, a _language_ is not open source; its _implementation_ is.

Right, well, let's see what happens. I kindda agree with Gordon Haff (http://www.cnet.com/news/apples-new-swift-coding-language-ho...) on being disappointed that Apple did choose a more open platform, but I suppose this can change in time, like with Microsoft recent changes.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#199

Post by coldtea »

PopsiclePete wrote: post #186
pjmlp wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go's gouroutines trace back to the Modula-2 co-routines and Ada tasks, just to cite two possible examples. Go's channels make use of CSP theory which had as first implementation Occam.

Ah, Modula-2. Yes. Very popular in the corporate world; huge hit on Github/Bitbucket as well. Lots of libraries, web frameworks....up-and-comer, for sure. I hear we'll soon be writing iOS apps in it? Occam? No comment. At least Ada is being actively used in something, but Modula-2 and Occam? Seriously? You can find any idea currently in use that was probably first academically tested out and "proven" in "Obscure-lang…

>Ah, Modula-2. Yes. Very popular in the corporate world; huge hit on Github/Bitbucket as well. Lots of libraries, web frameworks....up-and-comer, for sure. I hear we'll soon be writing iOS apps in it? Occam? No comment. At least Ada is being actively used in something, but Modula-2 and Occam? Seriously?

Are you just trolling or simply act defensively?

Nobody said anything about it being found in languages that are in popular use today. What the parent said was that those features already existed in several languages.

That those languages also had to be "popular" is just a random restriction you added. In fact it has nothing to do with the origins of the features.

Oh, and Modula-2 and Occam are hardly some obscure, unknown languages (especially back in the day). In fact, they are some of the most well known and copied languages in PL history. Even Java copied a lot from Modula-2 itself, by its designers own admission. And Occam has inspired several modern lanaguages.

>How did Go haters ever survive the rise of Ruby, for example? A language which brought absolutely nothing interesting to the table, yet after people experienced RoR became more popular, in one month, than Occam, CSP, Modula-2, Oberon, combined, times 1000? You guys must have been foaming at the mouth for years.

Juvenile stuff. Moving along.

(Btw, CSP is not a language. It's a decades old mechanism for concurrency, the one Go itself uses -- and available in other modern languages too, including Clojure. Shows how much you know about those things).

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#200

Post by Vetre »

EpicEng wrote: post #190
Vetre wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree. You can't downplay the massive indie game libraries or even AA games out there. They're not breaking records, but they make a large amount of sales. There are several massive communities that use Monogame (even still use XNA) and Unity. It's huge in the indie community, and is basically how the XB1, PS4, and Vita expect you to make games for their systems. The Vita Tool Chain is mostly C#. Su…

I suppose you're right, I shouldn't have downplayed them. I just think you need to segregate the two groups as they are almost completely different industries. To say that "C# is really popular in the video game industry" is misleading.

I can mostly see your argument. It makes sense. The indie and AAA industry are two different beasts, but they are the same industry.

It feels like one of those big business vs small business issues. If you have the man power and the resources, you can go much farther much faster. But not every starting company can afford the overhead of going full C++ and Engine heavy.

So C# being 'really' popular in the AAA side of the industry is a tad misleading (though can be used as a language on top of the engine, for tools (where it is probably most used), and for tool-chain), to discount it only due to the top 33% of companies usage, is a bit unfair to the quite large and growing indie and AA crowd.

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