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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”

#471

Post by sacado2 »

pjmlp wrote: post #459
alkonaut wrote: post #313

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

Hah, I precisely use Go when I have to think deeply, i.e. about a difficult to solve problem.

When the problem is boring, use a fun & challenging language. When the problem is fun and challenging, use a boring language.

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

#472

Post by Dewie3 »

Manishearth wrote: post #453
aikah wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Though there might be much to say about the different implementations of generics, I've found them to be easy to understand and use in languages. No type theory required. That has been more like "Oh, so that's the name for that thing/aspect, neat".

If I don't have a problem with that, those coveted master race Google developers should have absolutely no problem with it.

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

#473

Post by pluma »

tomelders wrote: post #470
sjackso wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supporting Linux is a surprise, but I think it's a great move on their part. Think: How many iOS apps are frontends to a server API? And how many of those APIs are running on Linux servers? Swift on Linux means ~all the code for a client-server iOS app can be written in the same language.

I'm going to double down on my bet that Apple will position Swift as the lingua franca to replace javascript. Front end and backend.

Good luck with that. One of the reasons JS is the lingua franca is that every browser comes with a JS runtime, all you need to get started is a plaintext text editor and all you need to publish an "app" is cheap/free web space.

Mark my words: Swift won't replace JS, not even PHP.

EDIT: Also, what's the point of writing Swift code in Linux if you aren't developing for iOS? As a non-iOS developer nothing at all compels me to learn Swift. It doesn't bring anything to the table that JS, Python, Ruby etc don't already do better. Except iOS support. HN tends to forget that just because iOS is the default in the US it's not internationally. Apple is a luxury brand, not a commodity one.

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

#474

Post by pluma »

Glide wrote: post #362
coldtea wrote: post #176

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.

> And Swift doesn't have the stigma of being a "bad" language when compared to JS.

Except Swift has the stigma of being a "dumbed down" Objective-C.

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

#475

Post by Dewie3 »

Glide wrote: post #434
zenocon wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The idea that more verbose == more readable is so annoying. It seems to be especially egregious in languages like Ada, which look like this to me (an uninitiated):

    okay here comes a function definition get ready
      function MyFun() begin
        return 1
      end begin
      end MyFun
    end function okay we are done

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

#477

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Dewie3 wrote: post #472
Manishearth wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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…

Though there might be much to say about the different implementations of generics , I've found them to be easy to understand and use in languages. No type theory required. That has been more like "Oh, so that's the name for that thing/aspect, neat". If I don't have a problem with that, those coveted master race Google developers should have absolutely no problem with it.

Well, variance can be hard for many to grock. The combination of generics, mutation, and subtyping is problematic, complicating nice feature like type inference. I can see why Pike and company left it out, though I think it's quite feasible to fix their problems.

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

#478

Post by Rapzid »

nickysielicki wrote: post #161
cpr wrote: post #11

Nice to see that Chris (Lattner) got his way. I chatted with him last WWDC right after the main Swift technical session, and he expressed the desire to open source it, but had no idea if he could get it through the powers that be. Supporting the standard libraries on Linux is certainly a surprise, though.

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…

I really like Go and have written quite a bit.. But go into #go-nuts and ask about unsafe. Just as a counter point.

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

#479

Post by 72deluxe »

keeganpoppen wrote: post #432
notduncansmith wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Some people aren't learning to be helpful or less snarky though.... :-)

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

#480

Post by 72deluxe »

Tloewald wrote: post #343
coldtea wrote: post #176

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 seems to me that Microsoft and Apple are -- quite consciously -- in a war to own the next ubiquitous language (the precursors being Javascript, PHP, Java, C++, C, Fortran, and COBOL). This is the language that Comp Sci students will spend their time in, that kids and hobbyists will tinker with, and so on. It's a huge deal -- the stakes are enormous. C# was in good shape and got better with Microsoft's recent cross…

Very true. I wonder if they'll both earn the same? C# seems well paid here in the UK.
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