101–110 of 122 posts
They should really come up with a better name. Phoenix is over used and even in open-source has a long history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox
Seriously. Unfortunately OpenSwift appears to be taken [0]. It would have been the obvious choice. [0] http://sourceforge.net/projects/openswift/
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Did you not actually read the comment you replied to? The entire point was that they haven't even said "We intend to open-source Swift once we're ready." The last we heard, they hadn't even considered open-sourcing it, like, ever. (To clarify for people who like to misread things, I did not just say "They expressly intend to never open-source it." I said that, last we heard, they had not even talked about ever open-s…
Why should they waste 30 seconds on that? To satisfy you? Very few people really care about this. If they say anything and then it takes longer to deliver than they thought those people will jump down their throat. Better to say nothing and announce when ready.
PS: Where did I ask for a timetable?
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Seems likely. It's not like objective-c is closed to other people, and the extensions to Objective-C that Apple has made are open. Swift and Objective-C are based on LLVM, which Apple has supported since very early on, and which is open sourced itself. It would be kinda out of character for Apple (the real Apple not the boogeyman Apple which is mostly a straw man) to not release a programming language as open source.…
>It's not like objective-c is closed to other people, and the extensions to Objective-C that Apple has made are open. When Objective-C was developed in 86 it was closed source. NeXT purchased it (in 88, still closed), and planed to keep it closed source. Orginal Obj-C would be parsed into byte code to be compiled by the GCC, not directly parsed. GNU didn't agree with this (adding a way to compile byte code). Eventual…
That toolchain nonetheless appears to be open sourced, so I'm not convinced it stands as evidence that Apple won't open source Swift. (Not that it stands as evidence that they will, either.)
Wikipedia's telling of GNU and Objective-C's history sounds somewhat less combative than yours. According to Richard Stallman, "NeXT proposed to distribute a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them. Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me at the time that it was, but since the result was very undesirable for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer. What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider such schemes to be 'subterfuges' and would be very harsh toward them. So I went back to Jobs and said we believed his plan was not allowed by the GPL." There's no suggestion that the FSF ever sued NeXT; Stallman's own description boils down to "We told them they couldn't do that, and they said okay and made it free."
Swift is a beautiful language but you want to keep it all to yourself. We don't know that's true or not. AFAIK, Apple has not officially commented on this topic. Actually, having spoken with Swift team in Apple (rather not mention their names in case they get in trouble) on this topic, they seemed to be happy opening it up in general and opening it up as a general purpose language. Swift could ultimately replace C++…
Indeed, I believe there is some internal conflict on this. Hopefully Phoenix will help sway the debate.
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I mean, didn't Microsoft open source Visual Basic[0]? Was that the joke? [0] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/roslyn.aspx
Welp. When I did some cursory googling for "visual basic open source", that page wasn't anywhere on my results. Now I feel like a fool. I'd still be very surprised if Swift got the same treatment. It just doesn't seem like a very Apple-ey thing to do.
Well, clang...
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> There are so many open source languages in the ML family, a few of them are even used in the industry for several years now. Just go and join one of those projects. Well, some people like the decisions behind Swift, and would prefer a language with an ecosystem, documentation and developer community of the size that results from Apple being involved in it compared to, say, Jane Street. Heck, people also use Go most…
> it's a language 30 years behind Swift. Interesting idea. Can you post a link that explains why that is?
Now, Swift is pragmatic too, and far from cutting edge, but still ways ahead of Go in that area, and its creator is a very strong player in the field of compilers (he also did LLVM).
Here's a link that shows how much hasn't changed:
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> There are so many open source languages in the ML family, a few of them are even used in the industry for several years now. Just go and join one of those projects. Well, some people like the decisions behind Swift, and would prefer a language with an ecosystem, documentation and developer community of the size that results from Apple being involved in it compared to, say, Jane Street. Heck, people also use Go most…
> it's a language 30 years behind Swift. Interesting idea. Can you post a link that explains why that is?
Wow, this _open letter_ is so full of nerd rage that it fails to capture any of my sympathy. I expected to see a humble effort to create an open-source Swift compiler that would move the conversation forward. Instead, I'm left feeling this effort is out of spite alone. All of this before Apple has made any final decision on the matter one way or another. It would be really cool if the Swift compiler would build code…
It's funny, when I first skimmed the letter I thought, cool, open source Swift. However when I moved past skimming and actually read the letter... wow, it's terrible.
As others have mentioned the first name thing makes the authors sound like some douchey Brogrammers. The rest of the letter is just condescending, snarky or just plain undecipherable and wrong. For example "Swift is a beautiful language but you want to keep it all to yourself. That’s just not on.". They're not keeping it for themselves, they made the language so it's easier for developers to create software and in fact they give away the language/ide/debugger/etc away for free.
"That's just not on." Is this open letter really intended for Tim Cook? Do you think the leader of Apple actually likes to wade through clumsy slang? Have you thought of sprinkling the word "hella" around for more emphasis?
I now view the whole thing as a cautionary tale about the dangers of skimming internet pages.
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> it's a language 30 years behind Swift. Interesting idea. Can you post a link that explains why that is?
I guess because the Go creators didn't study much (or cared about) the last decades of language research. Heck, the major language they were involved and associated with, C, wasn't that "current" even at the time when it appeared, just pragmatic in a "worse is better" way and readily available. They were every influencial systems guys, with C, Unix, Plan 9, etc, but not really big PL/Compiler guys. Now, Swift is prag…