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Why Rubyist Will Love Swift

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Re: Why Rubyist Will Love Swift

#11

Post by tendom »

galfarragem wrote: post #6

I'm not a rubyist, neither I am a professional programmer, but I'm sad that Apple didn't/couldn't choose Ruby as their main language. Nowadays I'm deciding what programming language to learn as a hobby. Reality (market) tells me that should be JavaScript or right now Swift (looks like javascript for me). It makes me sad, I wish it could be Ruby. So clean and clear. Everything makes sense, I don't need to memorize alm…

Ruby isn't fast enough, and it would chew battery on a phone and make some apps impossible to do correctly. Ruby is a great language, it's my favourite hands down, but all that sugar comes at a cost. Even in ruby, we often use c libs to do the heavy lifting, they're just wrapped by ruby using the C extension framework.

Re: Why Rubyist Will Love Swift

#12

Post by Jtsummers »

galfarragem wrote: post #6

I'm not a rubyist, neither I am a professional programmer, but I'm sad that Apple didn't/couldn't choose Ruby as their main language. Nowadays I'm deciding what programming language to learn as a hobby. Reality (market) tells me that should be JavaScript or right now Swift (looks like javascript for me). It makes me sad, I wish it could be Ruby. So clean and clear. Everything makes sense, I don't need to memorize alm…

The primary difference between swift and dynamic languages like ruby is the type system. An existing language like ruby would've been unsuitable if one of the objectives was a safer type system. Taking ruby and putting a static type system into it would've been interesting, but would've created a fork of the primary ruby language, which has its own pain points (being so close, but not quite the same language).

On the other hand, an existing language with the right type system features would've needed a lot of rework to make it suitable for the object model and API.

Or it'd be like C++, where you can program C++ for Linux, or C++ for Windows, and a lot of things may be the same, but then you find out that one of them has different semantics for what you thought was a standard library.

Re: Why Rubyist Will Love Swift

#13

Post by allsystemsgo »

Karunamon wrote: post #7

As a wannabe-rubyist who thinks reading Obj-C is somewhere between having a migraine and using H2SO4 eye drops, so far I'm in love with the language. I'm doing lots of tripping over the Cocoa APIs, though, in no small part due to Xcode. The error messages you get when you've done something wrong are unintuitive at best and downright misleading at worst. Example: I've got a field I want to render an image in. It's rep…

It's still in beta dude. Night and day difference between beta and gold master. If you're turned away from a brand new language due to an IDE's autocomplete, then you're in for a world of hurt when you start learning all the Cocoa APIs.

Re: Why Rubyist Will Love Swift

#14

Post by mcosta »

Why Rubyist Will Love Swift? Because Apple has published it.

Disclaimer: I have walked the tutorial and reference and I belive it is fantastic. I am waiting for someone to release a linux compiler.

Re: Why Rubyist Will Love Swift

#15

Post by [deleted] »

Karunamon wrote: post #7

As a wannabe-rubyist who thinks reading Obj-C is somewhere between having a migraine and using H2SO4 eye drops, so far I'm in love with the language. I'm doing lots of tripping over the Cocoa APIs, though, in no small part due to Xcode. The error messages you get when you've done something wrong are unintuitive at best and downright misleading at worst. Example: I've got a field I want to render an image in. It's rep…

[deleted]

Re: Why Rubyist Will Love Swift

#16

Post by e1ven »

allsystemsgo wrote: post #13
Karunamon wrote: post #7

As a wannabe-rubyist who thinks reading Obj-C is somewhere between having a migraine and using H2SO4 eye drops, so far I'm in love with the language. I'm doing lots of tripping over the Cocoa APIs, though, in no small part due to Xcode. The error messages you get when you've done something wrong are unintuitive at best and downright misleading at worst. Example: I've got a field I want to render an image in. It's rep…

It's still in beta dude. Night and day difference between beta and gold master. If you're turned away from a brand new language due to an IDE's autocomplete, then you're in for a world of hurt when you start learning all the Cocoa APIs.

Sure, and he acknowledged that they're still working on it, and is filing bug reports ;)

Having new people join a project/language, and finding it's warts/weird parts is awesome! It's part of how you learn where the REAL issues that bother people are, and set a development roadmap. He's using it, and telling Apple where it should evolve. That's the whole -point- of a Beta ;)

Re: Why Rubyist Will Love Swift

#17

Post by mitchty »

allsystemsgo wrote: post #13
Karunamon wrote: post #7

As a wannabe-rubyist who thinks reading Obj-C is somewhere between having a migraine and using H2SO4 eye drops, so far I'm in love with the language. I'm doing lots of tripping over the Cocoa APIs, though, in no small part due to Xcode. The error messages you get when you've done something wrong are unintuitive at best and downright misleading at worst. Example: I've got a field I want to render an image in. It's rep…

It's still in beta dude. Night and day difference between beta and gold master. If you're turned away from a brand new language due to an IDE's autocomplete, then you're in for a world of hurt when you start learning all the Cocoa APIs.

Heh, this is the truth. Most of the difficulty of learning Swift I think will lie in learning Cocoa. Just like Objective-C that.

Re: Why Rubyist Will Love Swift

#18

Post by riffraff »

jerluc wrote: post #10
Karunamon wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realise that you're talking about a prerelease, right? The language hasn't even been available to developers for a month yet, let alone the general public. Give the vibrant community effort some time.

I could be wrong, but I believe the parent is referring to the inability for a "vibrant community" to maintain Swift as a language implementation (instead of Apple), which is very different than Ruby. There's no doubt in my mind that there will be swarms of people developing with the language, but AFAICT, we'll mostly only see Apple developers working on the language itself.

also, isn't swift intimately tied to Cocoa & co?

Even if apple made great strides in open sourcing the language, compiler etc, I doubt we'll ever be able to run it on anything other than OSX/iOs.

Re: Why Rubyist Will Love Swift

#19

Post by samstokes »

tendom wrote: post #11
galfarragem wrote: post #6

I'm not a rubyist, neither I am a professional programmer, but I'm sad that Apple didn't/couldn't choose Ruby as their main language. Nowadays I'm deciding what programming language to learn as a hobby. Reality (market) tells me that should be JavaScript or right now Swift (looks like javascript for me). It makes me sad, I wish it could be Ruby. So clean and clear. Everything makes sense, I don't need to memorize alm…

Ruby isn't fast enough, and it would chew battery on a phone and make some apps impossible to do correctly. Ruby is a great language, it's my favourite hands down, but all that sugar comes at a cost. Even in ruby, we often use c libs to do the heavy lifting, they're just wrapped by ruby using the C extension framework.

The RubyMotion folks disagree:

RubyMotion for Android features a completely new Ruby runtime specifically designed and implemented for Android development. This is a new implementation of the Ruby language, it does not share code with RubyMotion for the Objective-C runtime. We are using the RubySpec project to make sure the runtime behaves as expected.

...

We feature an LLVM-based static compiler that will transform Ruby source files into ARM machine code. The generated machine code contains functions that conform to JNI so that they can be inserted into the Java runtime as is.

...

RubyMotion Android apps are packaged as .apk archives, exactly like Java-written apps. They weight about 500KB by default and start as fast as Java-written apps.

http://blog.rubymotion.com/post/87048665656/rubymotion-3-0-s...

Re: Why Rubyist Will Love Swift

#20

Post by pekk »

Jtsummers wrote: post #12
galfarragem wrote: post #6

I'm not a rubyist, neither I am a professional programmer, but I'm sad that Apple didn't/couldn't choose Ruby as their main language. Nowadays I'm deciding what programming language to learn as a hobby. Reality (market) tells me that should be JavaScript or right now Swift (looks like javascript for me). It makes me sad, I wish it could be Ruby. So clean and clear. Everything makes sense, I don't need to memorize alm…

The primary difference between swift and dynamic languages like ruby is the type system. An existing language like ruby would've been unsuitable if one of the objectives was a safer type system. Taking ruby and putting a static type system into it would've been interesting, but would've created a fork of the primary ruby language, which has its own pain points (being so close, but not quite the same language). On the…

Nothing about making programs for mobile devices in any way requires static typing.
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