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Smashing Swift

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Re: Smashing Swift

#71

Post by asveikau »

tkubacki wrote: post #59
rimantas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Objective-C is far from being shitty. Your comment, on the other hand, is.

You are overreacting. I'm not saying it's shitty - but it SEEMS to be at least for most Java/C# devs (I know) AT FIRST SIGHT. My hypothesis was: Objective-C is "not nice" (sorry, I'm not familiar with HN political correctness) therefore Swift feels like a true relief for iOS devs and thus this much traction.

It seems these days there are a lot of Java and C# focused people who are unfamiliar with what came earlier. They have a hard time making these sorts of comparisons.

To me the comparison that makes more sense is going from C to objc. Or alternatively, comparing objc and C++ (especially C++ as practiced in the 1990s, not the RAII or template patterns that emerged later).

Say you're looking at the landscape as it existed a while back, and you've decided to make language changes to C in order to add objects. On the one hand you have C++ as it existed then: a language that can't seem to figure itself out, that has a very complex syntax and lots of troubling situations you can walk into.

Then along comes objc. In contrast to C++, the language delta from C is tiny and easy to keep in your head. Especially before Apple started doing all this compiler-fu of recent years, it felt like just a few keywords bolted on, and most of the important additions seemed to be in the runtime library.

When I first saw objc it kind of clicked for me as the anti-C++, in a way that is truer to C and doesn't add a lot of complexity. At the time that seemed refreshing, though I think I see more good in C++ now that RAII and templates are more of a thing. (If only there existed a set of 2 people who could agree on what C++ features to use.)

Re: Smashing Swift

#72

Post by stcredzero »

To me, the things I tried weren’t insane; they seemed like the obvious things to try.

These are obvious things to try, from the POV of environments like Scala. That's the wrong context from which to evaluate this language. Swift is a more modern language for iOS and is most usefully evaluated in that context. (Though it is also important to also know what Swift is not in language terms.)

Re: Smashing Swift

#73

Post by skybrian »

twic wrote: post #54
JoshTriplett wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name "Functor" can be confusing; it's a thing you apply a function to , not a function itself. A Functor is a type t parameterized by some other type a , such that if you have a function from type a to type b , you can apply that function to a t of a and get a t of b . Most commonly, a functor will be a container of values of type a , and the mapping consists of applying the function to each value, resulting in a…

In an alternate universe where functional programming was invented by programmers rather than mathematicians, map would probably be called something like convertWith and a functor would probably be called something like a convertible . If you think of a function as being a way of converting from one kind of thing to another, then a functor is an object which has a number of things which you can convert to some other…

In Java we would call it "Mappable". A Mappable interface would have one method: map(). It hasn't been all that useful until recently due to lack of closures, but perhaps it would make sense in Java 8?

"Functor" is a terrible name that only a mathematician could like.

Re: Smashing Swift

#74

Post by Dewie »

skybrian wrote: post #73
twic wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an alternate universe where functional programming was invented by programmers rather than mathematicians, map would probably be called something like convertWith and a functor would probably be called something like a convertible . If you think of a function as being a way of converting from one kind of thing to another, then a functor is an object which has a number of things which you can convert to some other…

In Java we would call it "Mappable". A Mappable interface would have one method: map(). It hasn't been all that useful until recently due to lack of closures, but perhaps it would make sense in Java 8? "Functor" is a terrible name that only a mathematician could like.

What discipline did the word "map" come from? ;) Is "map" even descriptive? In a programming concept, the first time I heard it I thought it was referring to the data structure of the same name, which is pretty different.

Re: Smashing Swift

#75

Post by gdubs »

tkubacki wrote: post #59
rimantas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Objective-C is far from being shitty. Your comment, on the other hand, is.

You are overreacting. I'm not saying it's shitty - but it SEEMS to be at least for most Java/C# devs (I know) AT FIRST SIGHT. My hypothesis was: Objective-C is "not nice" (sorry, I'm not familiar with HN political correctness) therefore Swift feels like a true relief for iOS devs and thus this much traction.

Objective-C is a great language; at least a lot of us who have been developing in it for years think so. We're excited about Swift because although ObjC has modernized a great deal, there are limitations to how far it can be pushed. Swift's clean block syntax is a good example here. Objective-C, if you're not turned off by the syntax, can be a joy to program in.

Re: Smashing Swift

#76

Post by eridius »

eridius wrote: post #33

FWIW. map() already exists. It's a global function, rather than being a protocol method, and it uses overloading. So you can still define functions merely by defining a new overload for map() that operates on your type.

Sigh, I typed "functors", not "functions", which should make a bit more sense. Autocorrect changed that without me noticing.

Re: Smashing Swift

#77

Post by neurobro »

skybrian wrote: post #73
twic wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an alternate universe where functional programming was invented by programmers rather than mathematicians, map would probably be called something like convertWith and a functor would probably be called something like a convertible . If you think of a function as being a way of converting from one kind of thing to another, then a functor is an object which has a number of things which you can convert to some other…

In Java we would call it "Mappable". A Mappable interface would have one method: map(). It hasn't been all that useful until recently due to lack of closures, but perhaps it would make sense in Java 8? "Functor" is a terrible name that only a mathematician could like.

Just be thankful they didn't name it "Carnap" after the guy who introduced the idea. At least "functor" is moderately descriptive.

Re: Smashing Swift

#78

Post by skybrian »

Dewie wrote: post #74
skybrian wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Java we would call it "Mappable". A Mappable interface would have one method: map(). It hasn't been all that useful until recently due to lack of closures, but perhaps it would make sense in Java 8? "Functor" is a terrible name that only a mathematician could like.

What discipline did the word "map" come from? ;) Is "map" even descriptive? In a programming concept, the first time I heard it I thought it was referring to the data structure of the same name, which is pretty different.

Yes, good point. I suppose replaceEach() would be a more descriptive name, so the interface might be HasReplaceEach. It's not as easy to talk about, though. Still better than "functor".

(The function being passed in to map() is an alternate way to represent a very large map, in a mathematical sense.)

Re: Smashing Swift

#79

Post by terminus »

lxcid wrote: post #60
drivingmenuts wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes sense - Apple's philosophy is "Everything Apple" and so they have a vested interest in designing a language that gets things moving on their platform, rather than being the best language it can be right now. If, and this is a big if, Apple is actually interested in Swift in the long term, then they will open up the language to community development so that these sorts of things can be added by the communit…

This is kinda misunderstanding Apple approach to introducing technology. Apple seldom introduce a technology as intermediary solution or discard them soon after. (the last time this happen that I could remember was GC in Objective-C which is replaced by ARC) They could double down on it even if it has its algorithmic flaws, and they will attempts to fix those flaws. One of recent technologies that fall into this cate…

> They might not be the most open of company but they had open source technologies that are awesome in their own right. LLVM is just one of them. Open sourced and won the ACM award. That by itself is a achievement hard to beat.

I don't understand how a community project became "Apple's achievement."

Apple did not open source LLVM. LLVM was an open source project (since 2000), which Apple used and open sourced their contributions to on the way.

Re: Smashing Swift

#80

Post by mwfunk »

_random_ wrote: post #63
acqq wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple GUI development is obviously a major constraint. Another is: no GC in order to avoid the collections happening when they want and thus making the smoothness of the UI impossible. I still claim there isn't at this moment any more innovative language that can provide that what Swift provides, observing any GUI platform you want to observe: meaning that level of support for the platform's native GUI with that perf…

I see the source of your confusion now. To me innovation means something absolutely new, not re-applying/combining prior art. Wikipedia agrees: "Innovation differs from improvement in that innovation refers to the notion of doing something different rather than doing the same thing better."

There is absolutely nothing in the software world (or anywhere really) that meets your criteria for innovation then. I guarantee that absolutely anything you consider innovative fails the test you just described.
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