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IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

computerworld.com

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Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#71

Post by coldtea »

valarauca1 wrote: post #44

When I recently interviewed at Apple I was told my position would primarily be coding in Java, but the team would be open to other languages as the project progressed and needs changed. I asked if they would consider Swift. Then was told that Swift wasn't production ready in their eyes. (I didn't get the job) I guess every team is different, but this attitude to dog fooding isn't great.

>Then was told that Swift3 wasn't production ready in their eyes.

Well, not ready for their purposes, which (guessing from Java) would be some App/iTunes store backend, etc.

Other teams in Apple already use it for native app development from what I've read.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#72

Post by softawre »

Dancing_Mad wrote: post #39
nnq wrote: post #20

So... what's the "elevator pitch" for Swift? It has anything interesting over Elixir or Go (well, go's feature is "lack of feature" but you know what I mean) or Scala or Kotlin? I know that iOS and MacOS desperately needed a modern language, and great for them that they have it now, but does the rest of the world need it?

It allows enterprises to use their current iOS and macOS developers to do Web Application and server side applications. For developers it gives them additional ecosystems to use their skills on without having to learn a new language from scratch.

Heh, deja-vu man. That's what we said about ASP.net/windows years ago.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#73

Post by coldtea »

nnq wrote: post #20

So... what's the "elevator pitch" for Swift? It has anything interesting over Elixir or Go (well, go's feature is "lack of feature" but you know what I mean) or Scala or Kotlin? I know that iOS and MacOS desperately needed a modern language, and great for them that they have it now, but does the rest of the world need it?

>It has anything interesting over Elixir or Go

Compared to Go it's a whole other level of interesting...

Think of Highway 50 (NV) vs Highway 1 (CA).

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#74

Post by mrweasel »

Enterprises value stability over all else. Given the rather large changes to Swift 3, I don't see Swift as being "Enterprise Ready" just yet. That would require someone committing to maintain and patch Swift 3 for at least the next five, but preferably ten years.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#75

Post by pjmlp »

coldtea wrote: post #71
valarauca1 wrote: post #44

When I recently interviewed at Apple I was told my position would primarily be coding in Java, but the team would be open to other languages as the project progressed and needs changed. I asked if they would consider Swift. Then was told that Swift wasn't production ready in their eyes. (I didn't get the job) I guess every team is different, but this attitude to dog fooding isn't great.

> Then was told that Swift3 wasn't production ready in their eyes. Well, not ready for their purposes, which (guessing from Java) would be some App/iTunes store backend, etc. Other teams in Apple already use it for native app development from what I've read.

Yes, at WWDC they presented that launchd and the dock are now developed in Swift.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#76

Post by terhechte »

protomyth wrote: post #8

How is it going with Linux, Windows, BSD, etc. platforms? Anyone with experience using Swift on something other than an Apple product have a story?

Runs fine on the upcoming (almost-released) FreeBSD 11.0, Ubuntu & other Linuxes as well as Android. Not sure about Windows support, but people are working on that.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#77

Post by Razengan »

hellofunk wrote: post #34
nnq wrote: post #20

So... what's the "elevator pitch" for Swift? It has anything interesting over Elixir or Go (well, go's feature is "lack of feature" but you know what I mean) or Scala or Kotlin? I know that iOS and MacOS desperately needed a modern language, and great for them that they have it now, but does the rest of the world need it?

I think the pitch is that despite static typing, it offers a lot of multi-paradigm high-level features while remaining elegant with fairly minimal syntax compared to other native static languages like Rust or C++. It automatically manages memory but without a stop-the-world garbage collector and goes a long way to opening a lot of flexible design options to any developer: it has great support for generic programming,…

> You can't depend on performance when using them until you really study them. So much so, that WWDC had a big talk about how to choose language features depending on the type of performance you need, and none of it was intuitive.

In which language does optimal performance come for free without really studying it? You have to pay attention to your case and context and use features accordingly, no matter what language you're using..

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#78

Post by pjmlp »

themihai wrote: post #67
barkingcat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be ready for the enterprise ecosystem basically means that you can sue someone if things go wrong, and you can buy support packages for enormous sums of money. IBM is saying that you can 1) buy bluemix swift from them, and 2) sue them if anything goes wrong - but since they have a great legal team, they probably got ironclad agreements ready to go.

I thought stability of the ecosystem (i.e. stable standard library) was also a "must" for adoption by the enterprise. Never thought that a language in flux with "hosting" support from IBM is enough. But now it seems the enterprise world is eager to try the coolest thing and rewrite/refactor it after the next release as long as someone will host/run it. Now that you enlightened me I can see the stock markets, hospital…

Java and Smalltalk both benefited from IBM support.

However, Smalltalk later suffered when Visual Age for Smalltalk became Eclipse and IBM switched focus to just Java.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#79

Post by iheartmemcache »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #12

This reminds me of the big announcement of IBM partnering with Apple for iPad in the enterprise. I wonder how that worked out? I am a little sceptical of IBM's business plan, all in on Watson, etc., but I have used their Bluemix hosting services and it is fairly nice. BlueMix is has a great free tier level' you can run one or two small web services or apps for free. It is a good idea supporting Swift in the server.

There are plenty of enterprises silently chugging away with Cognos as their BI platform. 'IBM MobileFirst' (i.e. some guys basically make a 'custom' dashboard for your TM1 instance that C-levels can use on their iPhone) probably broke a profit by doing what they do best. (I.e. severely overcharging companies for functionality, in exchange for the purchasing authority having the ability to say "hey I bought IBM"). Cognos still is silently huge (TIBCO and Informatica levels of huge) and considering how the corporate world went from BlackBerry to iPhone, it's a safe bet that it made a profit.

Side-note: There was an article about the imminent demise of Oracle, but residual support contracts and the need for CIOs to keep renewing those contracts for a few hundred k a quarter is a cheap buy as insurance in the same way you go to PricewaterCooper and not JoeSchmo to get your books audited. (If/when PWC messes up, the board will overlook your failure.)

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#80

Post by pjmlp »

stepanhruda wrote: post #49
supster wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Inferred static nominal typing with generics 2. 1st class support for Optionals 3. Support for Structs and Classes 4. Native binary & scripting mode 5. Automatic reference counting (instead of garbage collection) 6. Large standard library 7. Large corporate backer (Apple) 8. Open source 9. Good C, C++, & Obj-C interoperability 10. Decently fast ( https://medium.com/@qutheory/server-side-swift-vs-the-other-... )

Non C++ interop yet

No, but one can make use of Objective-C++ as a way to create Swift wrappers.
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