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Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder

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Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder

#11

Post by sanderjd »

bigtunacan wrote: post #5

I see this and I just think of the Joe Armstrong post on education. http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/07... So many languages to choose from; so much fragmentation while we are already experiencing a shortage of developers. I appreciate that Apple made something available other than Objective-C. I've done my share of it and personally I don't think it's a bad language, but the foreign syntax m…

I think Swift is a great language, and that creating something new that incorporates some very good ideas into a package that works well with their existing and extensive runtime made a lot of sense, but that tying it to their platform is a damn shame (though not unsurprising).

I don't think the languages you list would have been a great fit, but D would have been a really good and interesting choice. Were it more mature, Rust could have also been a good fit.

Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder

#12

Post by jeorgun »

bigtunacan wrote: post #5

I see this and I just think of the Joe Armstrong post on education. http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/07... So many languages to choose from; so much fragmentation while we are already experiencing a shortage of developers. I appreciate that Apple made something available other than Objective-C. I've done my share of it and personally I don't think it's a bad language, but the foreign syntax m…

None of the languages you listed have Objective-C interoperability, which is pretty crucial for their purposes.

Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder

#13

Post by joshstaiger »

bigtunacan wrote: post #5

I see this and I just think of the Joe Armstrong post on education. http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/07... So many languages to choose from; so much fragmentation while we are already experiencing a shortage of developers. I appreciate that Apple made something available other than Objective-C. I've done my share of it and personally I don't think it's a bad language, but the foreign syntax m…

I get this argument for any other company.

But at this point Apple has gone to great lengths to control the entire toolchain from the OS to the compiler to the chips that run the instructions the compiler produces.

It’d seem odd if they didn’t go with something home-grown as their language of choice.

Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder

#14

Post by cmelbye »

weinzierl wrote: post #9

> Google’s Go is structured to simplify the work of making > code run “concurrently,” smoothing the way for > programmers to create and juggle portions of a program > that execute simultaneously — and thus take full > advantage of today’s multicore chips and multiprocessor > machines. It's a while since I last checked out Go but I thought Goroutines were coroutines and therefore confined to a single core. Does Go pro…

Parallelism is determined by an environment variable called GOMAXPROCS (or, set at runtime), which is the number of threads executing user-level Go code simultaneously. This includes goroutines. By default, GOMAXPROCS=1.

Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder

#15

Post by AnimalMuppet »

enneff wrote: post #7

Syntax is by far the least interesting thing about any new programming language, but they spend paragraphs talking about braces and semicolons. And the conclusions are bizarre and uninformed: > When Sun rolled out Java in 1995, everyone thought it would be a dandy tool for building browser applets that made images dance, yet its destiny was mostly server-side. Uhhh... what? Sun pushed for Java for _everything_, and t…

> > When Sun rolled out Java in 1995, everyone thought it would be a dandy tool for building browser applets that made images dance, yet its destiny was mostly server-side.

> Uhhh... what? Sun pushed for Java for _everything_, and they were hugely successful in doing so.

IIRC, Sun initially was thinking of Java for embedded systems. But garbage-collected embedded systems weren't going to fly in 1995 - the GC latency would be too long.

True, Sun tried to push Java everywhere. But where did it wind up? "Mostly server-side" seems like a valid statement. Yeah, it could run in the browser. Yeah, it could run on your desktop. But there weren't tons of Java desktop apps that I can recall, and it kind of lost out on the browser. So, mostly server-side.

Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder

#16

Post by nicklaf »

enneff wrote: post #7

Syntax is by far the least interesting thing about any new programming language, but they spend paragraphs talking about braces and semicolons. And the conclusions are bizarre and uninformed: > When Sun rolled out Java in 1995, everyone thought it would be a dandy tool for building browser applets that made images dance, yet its destiny was mostly server-side. Uhhh... what? Sun pushed for Java for _everything_, and t…

"Syntax is by far the least interesting thing about any new programming language, but they spend paragraphs talking about braces and semicolons."

I can't seem to locate the quote for this, but I believe there is a famous witticism on programming languages, which more or less states that arguments about the trivial issues of a language generate the most heated discussion, with syntax being simultaneously the most contentious and the least important.

Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder

#17

Post by sremani »

bencollier49 wrote: post #6

No mention of Rust, which I think ought to have been a natural addition to the article?

Author wanted to prove that Big Institutions build PLs so he sought languages that came out of huge corps and universities and Rust would go counter to his theory. pythong, ruby, perl were also not discussed as much. It is not a great article, probably for main-street consumption.

Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder

#18

Post by Dewie »

bencollier49 wrote: post #6

No mention of Rust, which I think ought to have been a natural addition to the article?

It's hard to imagine how they would go from discussing the conundrums of whether-to-use-braces-or-indentation, to discussing the merits of efficiency + memory safety.

Though I guess they could have chosen to bring up the peculiar meaning of the semicolon in Rust.

Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder

#19

Post by pjmlp »

teraflop wrote: post #10
weinzierl wrote: post #9

> Google’s Go is structured to simplify the work of making > code run “concurrently,” smoothing the way for > programmers to create and juggle portions of a program > that execute simultaneously — and thus take full > advantage of today’s multicore chips and multiprocessor > machines. It's a while since I last checked out Go but I thought Goroutines were coroutines and therefore confined to a single core. Does Go pro…

Go has supported "true" concurrency (distributing goroutines across cores) since at least version 1.0, and probably earlier.

You still need to touch GOMAXPROCS...

Re: Go and Swift take another step up the programming language ladder

#20

Post by freyrs3 »

nicklaf wrote: post #16
enneff wrote: post #7

Syntax is by far the least interesting thing about any new programming language, but they spend paragraphs talking about braces and semicolons. And the conclusions are bizarre and uninformed: > When Sun rolled out Java in 1995, everyone thought it would be a dandy tool for building browser applets that made images dance, yet its destiny was mostly server-side. Uhhh... what? Sun pushed for Java for _everything_, and t…

"Syntax is by far the least interesting thing about any new programming language, but they spend paragraphs talking about braces and semicolons." I can't seem to locate the quote for this, but I believe there is a famous witticism on programming languages, which more or less states that arguments about the trivial issues of a language generate the most heated discussion, with syntax being simultaneously the most cont…

Wadler's Law: https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Wadler%27s_Law

    In any language design, the total time spent discussing
    a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to
    the power of its position.

           0. Semantics
           1. Syntax
           2. Lexical syntax
           3. Lexical syntax of comments
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