Live data from Hacker News

“Swift will be open source later this year”

apple.com

451–460 of 573 posts

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

#451
post #362

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. That's just like your opinion man. If Swift is Open Source it's gonna be a huge thing, for two reasons: (a) it already attracts millions of developers because it's the suggested language to develop iOS apps in, and (b) it's a nice modern language that plays in a ve…

It'll be interesting to see how effective how many people make that transition to server side development. I mean we now have node for server side after JS becoming ubiquitous because of web browsers. And Swift doesn't have the stigma of being a "bad" language when compared to JS.

are you trying to compare JS using Node.js with Swift?

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

#452
post #371

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…

> Golang is a pragmatic crowd Why do people keep on saying that? Would people say javascript is for the pragmatic crowd because jsfiddle exists ? no Go is a badly designed language period. the type system forces devs to write runtime type assertions which should be the job of the compiler thanks to parametric types, if go designers knew one or 2 things about types. The fact that Go dismisses 30+ years of type theory…

I had the same opinion as you until I started some code with it.

The true is that I had never been so productive writing code. The friction from what is in your head and the code is almost 0.

It is true that I ended writing a few functions that were there only because the lack of generics, the type system and other stuff being "built-in". But at the end, I think it was an order of magnitude less often than I was expecting it to. I was wrong.

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

#453
post #371

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…

> Golang is a pragmatic crowd Why do people keep on saying that? Would people say javascript is for the pragmatic crowd because jsfiddle exists ? no Go is a badly designed language period. the type system forces devs to write runtime type assertions which should be the job of the compiler thanks to parametric types, if go designers knew one or 2 things about types. The fact that Go dismisses 30+ years of type theory…

[I'm a Rust user, and not particularly fond of Go, but...]

Not having great static typing doesn't make it not pragmatic.

Given Go's purpose, it is extremely pragmatic.

One of the reasons Google uses Go is because their employees are often fresh out of college and might not be familiar with the depths of type systems.

If you look at most professional Java/C++ code (starting to see this with Rust too), the features of the language are used to their full extent to create really convoluted APIs (to an outsider not familiar with the language). So, to work on it, one must first become familiar with the intricacies of these languages (this is not as easy as picking up a book, you need experience), and then with how the language is used in context, which is another time consuming thing.

Instead, go trades off some higher level features for compilation speed and ease of learning.

After programming in Go for a week I was able to pick up any Go code -- ranging from the standard library to various other applications, and know what was going on. I cannot say the same about Java or C++ or Rust; generics/templates/virtual/friend/advanced typesystem gymnastics all are used to great extents in the code for a standard library or some large application. one may be able to use the language for your own stuff after a week of learning and hacking, but one will need much more time before they're well suited to contribute significantly to existing codebases.

A course I took recently was taught by a PL aficionado. He knew Rust, Nim, and Go, along with many older languages. Go, Rust, and Erlang, among others, would have worked beautifully for the project topic (concurrent stuff). He made everyone write in Go because he wanted a uniform language for project evaluation, and because Go is something students could reasonably pick up in a week without constraints on their background.

=========================

At the same time, the Go community is pretty awesome. There is a "go way" of doing things, and while it is pretty rigid, that doesn't make it not pragmatic. From my (admittedly limited) discussions with them, they do seem to think practically/pragmatically. There are good reasons for wanting to use Go. These folks know those boundaries, and think practically within them.

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

#454
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Linux support.

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

#455
Swift for me is what Python3 should've been. For me as a Python user, this development is huge.

I've been watching for the language to move to instead of Python3. Of Rust, Go, Swift and other new languages, Swift always seemed to me the most appealing language.

Being the 1st class citizen on iOS makes learning this for serverside development very appealing. An ideal server language that enables single language client-server applications possible with iOS.

Once the popular libraries start to drop Python2 support (which may take decades, who knows), this is a no brainer as the language to migrate to instead of moving to the much less robust Python3 ecosystem.

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

#456
post #454
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Linux support.

GCC has supported Objective-C since at least version 2.0, released in 1992

(based on http://www.informatica.co.cr/linux/research/1992/0222.htm)

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

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels much too pragmatic for my taste. Exactly the kind of thing to come out of Google, to solve their type of problem (scalability, deployment are much more important than the code itself). Personally I don't have googles problems (few of us do!) and I really like a good type system, with algebraic types/pattern matching/generics

It feels much too pragmatic for my taste. C was unprincipled and pragmatic too, it was created with the goal of making UNIX portable. Still, C became one of the most popular and influential languages. While I prefer ADTs/generics too, let's not forget that many people are less principled and pragmatic factors influence language choice as much (toolchain, ecosystem, popularity, familiarity).

> Still, C became one of the most popular and influential languages.

That was a side effect of successful startups (Sun, SGI...) adopting UNIX as their OS.

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

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, why do you say that (about Go)?

It feels much too pragmatic for my taste. Exactly the kind of thing to come out of Google, to solve their type of problem (scalability, deployment are much more important than the code itself). Personally I don't have googles problems (few of us do!) and I really like a good type system, with algebraic types/pattern matching/generics

It is not pragmatic at all, it is a language for mine workers that are too stressed to think.

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

#460
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I long dreamed of using Objective C to build server apps. The compiler support has been there for years (GCC, later Clang), but there's no standard library. All the stuff you would want from Foundation is missing; strings, sockets, file I/O, encoding support, threads, etc., it turns out you'd have to reimplement a lot from scratch. There's GNUstep, but last I looked it, it was stagnant, and also very much geared towa…

The best Web development framework of all time was WebObjects, which started at NeXT. It was basically Cocoa for the web. It was wonderful. When Apple bought NeXT they continued it for awhile and ported it to Java to try and make it more cross platform. That didn't really take, as it was a commercial product and despite lowering the price dramatically many times and loosening the licensing restrictions this was the p…

At the time Sun was working together with NeXT for having Objective-C in Solaris (before Oak became Java) and got their base ideas for J2EE from WebObjects.
Post reply on HN