Live data from Hacker News

“Swift will be open source later this year”

apple.com

431–440 of 573 posts

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#431
Much of the sentiment here is about how Swift will drive iOS developers to write APIs in the language. I think the inverse is much more fascinating and creates greater business benefit for Apple: If developers start using Swift for interesting or prominent projects outside of iOS, then that drives people to learn Swift outside of the Apple ecosystem. This means that the barrier to learning and building iOS apps drops, and Apple gains more, potentially experienced developers writing code.

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a Makefile.. for.. Make.

I feel like this reply could have been much more helpful and less snarky. Some people are still learning - we all were, at one point.

everyone is always learning (hopefully) ;D

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still uninformed crap that implies Apple reneged on a promise, when in reality they were forcibly stopped.

The fact still remains that Apple made a big promise without analyzing all the legal aspects of it. Most average to big size companies do the reverse of it - Make sure the legalities are in their favor before making big announcements.

It's hard to know what really happened, but the story is that it was basically Steve Jobs who made that big promise himself. It is said (and again, who knows if this is true, but that's the story) that the first time the FaceTime engineers heard about making it an open standard was when Steve announced it to the world.

Open sourcing Swift, on the other hand, is clearly something they've been planning for a while with the full knowledge of all involved and wasn't just a sudden impulsive sort of thing.

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What on earth are you talking about? Parsing a JSON response in Swift is basically the same as it is in Objective C: let parsed: AnyObject? = NSJSONSerialization.JSONObjectWithData(data, options: NSJSONReadingOptions.AllowFragments, error:&parseError)

This is truly not meant to be a snarky comment, but why is it so overtly verbose? I left Java years ago b/c it was making my fingers arthritic it seems. It doesn't look like much fun. Sure, IDEs do autocomplete, but still requires parsing by the human eye. I'm sure you get used to it. Every language looks horrible the first time, then you learn to live with it and maybe love it, but on first glance that looks pretty…

Objective-C tends to err on the side of readability. Considering that source code is read many more times than it is written it's something I personally agree with. But yeah it's something you do get used to.

Java's problem is that C# exists and is a more expressive language.

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not even wrong... Open source Dylan was open sourced by a company called Functional Objects. The Macintosh Programmer's Workbench was never open source to my knowledge. Since both of these are semi-obscure and incorrect it's obvious that you've just cursory searched for stuff you don't have direct knowledge of just to bass Apple (which has open sourced several things as well as provided changes back to the com…

Ah, fanboys. MPW used to be available from "ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Tool_Chest/Core_Mac_OS_Tools/MPW_etc./", but Apple took their FTP server down. There's still a mirror.[1] It's mostly ".hqx" files, so you need to find something that can decompress old Stuffit files. [1] http://staticky.com/dl/ftp.apple.com/developer/

That site hosted free downloads of the thing, but as far as I know the source code was never released.

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xcode is written Xcode, not xCode. Thank you and good night. ps. if you have any friends who work in Apple retail, twice a year or so they have a big clear out of some of the internal use machines. You can pick up fairly good machines for very very cheap. They had 2009 white MacBooks for 170 bucks or so the last time.

This is a great tip. My main laptop is a 2009 white MacBook with an SSD I cannibalised from another old laptop. The only thing I miss is Civilization V, everything else is fine.

Doesn't Civ V run on Mac as well ?

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#438
post #289
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Objc just got dynamics :)

I'm confused. Objective-C has had dynamic typing, dynamic dispatch and dynamic pretty much everything for years. What does "just got dynamics" mean?

I had a brainfart and meant to type generics

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's terrible. Parsing a JSON response into a Swift object takes a full-day to figure out when it's literally just JSON.parse(response) in any other language. You can't pass immutable structures (structs) into NSNotifications and I can't figure out why. It's confusing and poorly documented, and a complete chore to use. React Native is a godsend.

How is React "native" again? I'm not sure I understand how something not written in Swift or Obj. C is 'native.' This is only 30% snark; I actually don't know the answer. React is from the same people that thought html5 was a good idea for a mobile application right? I am not bashing React; I am only curious how it's considered native. Does it have official support from the iOS APIs? Can you integrate Objective C lib…

They mean "React Native"[0], not React itself :)

[0] http://reactnative.com

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too little too late. Apple could have got my attention if they had done this from the start, but at this point I find it hard to get excited about this. Half the reason I find myself drawn to a new language is the culture and community surrounding it. You might think this seems silly at first glance, they're programming languages, not fraternities. But hear me out. Golang is a pragmatic crowd. Go into #go-nuts on fre…

Hey, look me up in a year and explain why you were wrong. Go has been out for 6 years and has less than 10,000 questions on StackOverFlow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/go Swift has 37,000 questions in its first year: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/swift I'm a fan of Go. I built my websites in it and I've written a few small apps. However, you really are overlooking how much of a difference the…

> Anyway, 1,000,000 Swift developers will change everything.

All of these objective-C developers changed nothing for non-ios crowd. Why would swift be different?

Post reply on HN