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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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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
And Go is nice, but I rather use Rust a thousand times.
Go, on the other side, seems nice. I still have to give it a go (pun intended)
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.
This mistake happens a lot: Go is not a "Google" language in the sense of corporate ownership. Development is sponsored by Google, but control is left in the community. This is on the opposite end of the spectrum from Swift which is controlled by Apple, which is not necessarily a bad thing depending on your perspective.
The article doesn't say that. However, Go did originate at Google and the points the article makes about it having been designed to solve specific problems at Google are all true. It was not originally intended to be a widely-used general-purpose language: it just happened to catch on after it was released publicly. Furthermore, the most significant contributors to the language design and its evolution (Rob Pike, Rus…
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 are in the same space as Obj-C.
I really wasn't trying to point to any particular language here though. As one commenter pointed out, maybe D would be a closer match up. I'm not trying to say any particular language is the right decision. I'm also not trying to point the finger at Apple.
I just wonder if some of this explosion of languages that is happening right now isn't harmful in the long run.
This mistake happens a lot: Go is not a "Google" language in the sense of corporate ownership. Development is sponsored by Google, but control is left in the community. This is on the opposite end of the spectrum from Swift which is controlled by Apple, which is not necessarily a bad thing depending on your perspective.
The article doesn't say that. However, Go did originate at Google and the points the article makes about it having been designed to solve specific problems at Google are all true. It was not originally intended to be a widely-used general-purpose language: it just happened to catch on after it was released publicly. Furthermore, the most significant contributors to the language design and its evolution (Rob Pike, Rus…
Facebook uses PHP for much of their server-side stuff. They did a PHP compiler to make that tolerably fast.
Mozilla's Rust has potential, but I'm not convinced they have the "owning" logic right. Supposedly 10% of the code in Servo, their browser renderer, is "unsafe". That's far too high. They've had their first good big idea, but I think they're one or two key concepts short of definitively solving the problem of memory safety without garbage collection.
Swift I don't know about.
Interestingly, these are all hard-compiled languages. Most of the "flexibility" of scripting languages has been removed. It seems that the one scripting language feature programmers really wanted type inference for local variables. That's a feature of Go, Swift, Rust, and PHP. Even C++ has that now, with "auto". (Writing iterator type declarations in C++ FOR statements was a huge pain.) It's almost better if function parameters have hard types; you can look at the function definition and see what it wants. Python and JavaScript leave you wondering "what type is parameter 3 supposed to be, anyway?"
There's some syntactic convergence, too. Go, Rust, and Swift all use C-type brackets. Python indentation style control structure didn't catch on. We're also converging on "name: type", instead of C's "type name" form. That was a design mistake in C; the language became context-sensitive when "typedef" was added and the compiler had to known which words were type names. Where to put semicolons, though, is not converging.