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“Swift will be open source later this year”

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

#551

Post by VikingCoder »

BuckRogers wrote: post #544
VikingCoder wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...except when I'm on desktop. GMail via web, every time.

That will change soon with Windows 10. If you're on Linux you have no choice. And if you personally had to maintain Gmail on the web, you couldn't do it yourself. Enormous time put into an application such as Gmail. So suggesting you'd build Gmail on the web vs an app is disingenuous to suggest. It's quite an edge case for many reasons.

If I had to personally maintain GMail app, I couldn't do it myself, either. I don't see how this is remotely relevant.

I'm not suggesting I'd build GMail one way or another. I'm saying that since GMail web is available to me on my desktop, where I spend the majority of my day, that's how I prefer to use it. It's nice to also have an app, but that's way less percent of my time. And I think reading and typing in GMail is way nice on my desktop.

Sure, it's an edge case, but so is Reddit, so is HN, so is G+, so is Facebook, so is CNN, so is Github, so is StackOverflow, so is xkcd, so is news.google.com...

I spend way more time on those sites on my desktop than I ever would in their corresponding apps.

Add all those edge cases up, not to mention all the websites those things link to, and it's a HUGE part of my day. Apps? Sure. I like em.

And sure, when I'm on mobile, any given content is probably nicer in an app. But sharing, mixing, quickly browsing... web wins hand-down for me.

I wouldn't even know how to take a page from my CNN app (unless they give me a web URL) and discuss it on my Reddit app. Do you?

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

#552

Post by VikingCoder »

sinnet11 wrote: post #541
VikingCoder wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Native mobile is "winning", in terms of being usually a far superior UX, and by sheer numerical demand. Yeah? I could type a URL to anything here, and you could view it. If instead hide my content behind an app, I can't deep link to it. The likelihood of you installing the app to see the content is way lower. You need space on your mobile device to install my app. Potentially a password entered to install it. It ne…

Lets say I'm searching for a house. If I go to redfin.com on my phone vs the native redfin app, there is a distinct difference in UX. The native app by far surpasses the mobile app in terms of performance and usability. Now this is one example but can be said for many sites whose functionality isn't just to display static content.

I feel like people are ignoring my fundamental point -

There are things the web can do that native currently sucks at. Sometimes those things are really important to me.

I'm not saying web is always better than native. Far from it. But I am saying web is sometimes way better than native. Even on mobile.

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

#553

Post by herval »

pluma wrote: post #503
herval wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point on having Swift on other platforms means you can write software for things other than iOS/OSX. It's a fun, modern language that brings A LOT to the table that js/py/rb don't (type checking and the ability to distribute binaries, for starters).

But programmers don't want better languages[0]. Programmers mostly just want what they already have. You can't overcome that kind of resistance just by saying "look, here's a language that's more fun and modern". Programmers say they want better languages, but good luck trying to convince them to switch to a new language just by its merit. The only tangible benefit of Swift is that it can be used instead of Objective…

Following your logic, Javascript just started growing on the server-side due to a number of frontend devs "just wanting what they already have". There's a huge number of mobile devs out there that have to, one way or another, write server-side code. Guess what'd be their language of choice then (when the Apple-backed open-source Swift is out)?

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

#554

Post by ufmace »

V-2 wrote: post #361
jophde wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I ever care about Go for Android when I can write apps in Kotlin? Kotlin is fully interoperable with Java. I don't have much experience with Swift but Kotlin is so nice. It has the best features from numerous languages such as Ruby. C#, etc. It's being made by Jetbrains who makes the the core of Android Studio so it will have support. Kotlin is also nearly as fast at runtime as Java with a tiny 200kb runtim…

Kotlin is positively awesome, but when I tried it (admittedly last year) it didn't seem ready for production yet. It worked all well as long as stuff was kept simple, then I used Realm.io, wrote some unit tests and got all sorts of NoClassDefFoundError exceptions, dexmaker errors etc. Long story short, I couldn't fix it. As I said, it's been a while. I hope things have been improving and continue to improve. The lang…

I've just been playing with it some in the last couple of weeks. I get the impression that they're still iterating pretty rapidly on it - at least partly because the official practice repo uses trait all over the place, which they apparently deprecated and changed to interface.

I will say that it It looks very promising so far, and seems to have the best of C# and Ruby, assuming you're sticking with compile-time type checking, plus a few more tricks besides. I'm not that up on JVM languages though, so I'm not sure that it's definitively better than any of the other choices.

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

#555

Post by pcwalton »

eropple wrote: post #384
abalone wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key word here is "partly" Swift. I would not put it past Apple to use an intermediary framework that hosts a Swift runtime and calls into native Android APIs. That keeps the non-UI logic in one codebase.

That's more or less what they do with iTunes, isn't it? I recall there being an incomplete library packaged with iTunes once upon a time (with stuff like a stub implementation of Grand Central Dispatch that was neither grand nor dispatching).

iTunes (used to, at least) have a lot of Mac OS 9/Carbon stuff partially ported to Windows, in fact.

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

#556

Post by BuckRogers »

VikingCoder wrote: post #551
BuckRogers wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will change soon with Windows 10. If you're on Linux you have no choice. And if you personally had to maintain Gmail on the web, you couldn't do it yourself. Enormous time put into an application such as Gmail. So suggesting you'd build Gmail on the web vs an app is disingenuous to suggest. It's quite an edge case for many reasons.

If I had to personally maintain GMail app, I couldn't do it myself, either. I don't see how this is remotely relevant. I'm not suggesting I'd build GMail one way or another. I'm saying that since GMail web is available to me on my desktop, where I spend the majority of my day, that's how I prefer to use it. It's nice to also have an app, but that's way less percent of my time. And I think reading and typing in GMail…

Again you're back to what we've already established the web is ideal for. It's original intended purpose- simple document sharing. It's been doing this since the early 90s.

While sharing info on Wikipedia is great, where the web fails is competing with native apps. Other than sharing HTML text documents (and there are projects working to replace that too), it doesn't get chosen over native apps.

Also, I'd still say that you'd come a lot closer to being able to maintain a Gmail-style app on iOS, than you ever could on the web. As a 1 man operation. Plenty of people actually do personally maintain email native apps alone on mobile. But unless you go with basic HTML or little to no features, I don't think 1 person is keeping a web email client up to date for all browsers, all the time.

The reason you prefer using webapps on the desktop, is simply because that's where you are all day. At a desk. If you were in anything but a desk job, it'd be the complete opposite. It's not an issue of superiority, it's a matter of convenience. For most people, that convenience is flipped and the experience is equal or better. Which is why native apps are winning.

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

#558

Post by jokoon »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #529
jokoon wrote: post #527

In other news I have a macbook pro I really need to sell to buy a thinkpad. Microsoft opened .NET, while apple is just releasing a language for its platform because mozilla and Google did too. While the latter opened sourced the languages. Microsoft is just getting out of their walled garden, while Apple still has a much stronger one, which is worse because they tie their software with their hardware, which is a real…

Uh, Apple just weakened the walled garden. They allowed self-signed apps.

Cocoa is still a walled garden api. At least microsoft used C and C++ like everyone did.

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

#560

Post by VikingCoder »

BuckRogers wrote: post #556
VikingCoder wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to personally maintain GMail app, I couldn't do it myself, either. I don't see how this is remotely relevant. I'm not suggesting I'd build GMail one way or another. I'm saying that since GMail web is available to me on my desktop, where I spend the majority of my day, that's how I prefer to use it. It's nice to also have an app, but that's way less percent of my time. And I think reading and typing in GMail…

Again you're back to what we've already established the web is ideal for. It's original intended purpose- simple document sharing. It's been doing this since the early 90s. While sharing info on Wikipedia is great, where the web fails is competing with native apps. Other than sharing HTML text documents (and there are projects working to replace that too), it doesn't get chosen over native apps. Also, I'd still say t…

Why do I get to target iOS only with my email client on the one hand, but I have to support "all browsers" on the other? Stop stacking the deck, ok?

> If you were in anything but a desk job, it'd be the complete opposite.

...and if I were a banana, I'd probably prefer sunshine. I'm saying there are cases for me where the web is way better, even on mobile.

You can't prove to me that's not true, because it is. It's like you're trying to talk me out of observational data on my own life experience.

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