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The Swift Programming Language

developer.apple.com

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Re: The Swift Programming Language

#791

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

mox1 wrote: post #397
ktran03 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood what the fuss was all about either. If you know one other language really well, Objective-C should take a week or two to get use to. To understand all the design patters, apple HIG, XCode, profiling, libraries, debugging, app submission, etc, these combined is where youll sink your time to learn iOS development. Imo, Objective-C is the easy part.

I recently translated one of my Apps from Android to iPhone. I had 0 objective-C experience, but I made it work. It was a bit of a frustrating experience. Many times I found myself writing Objective-C boilerplate-ish code that I had 0 clue what it was doing, considering this is a hobby / for fun project I just wanted it working. It's not easy to google the answer to, "Why did I just add this new keyword after this co…

You've just described exactly what it feels like transitioning from iOS to Android development, too.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#792

Post by ics »

codezero wrote: post #790

A lot of commenters here are asking whether it will be open sourced, I'm curious, specific to those who think it should be open sourced: why? I'm not really curious about the philosophical reasons, but really the practical ones. How would Swift being open source help you as a developer? It's clearly targeted at iOS and Mac OS X, so does this mean you won't write Mac OS X or iOS apps if it's not open source, or did yo…

Two big ones off the top of my head:

    - Porting to other platforms/community implementations (think Mono)
    - Developer input: being able to submit bugs, influence or even just *watch* the trajectory of the language, get a deeper understanding of how various components are really implemented

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#793

Post by lukeholder »

jakejake wrote: post #542
domluna wrote: post #521

It looks pretty nice, I hope they didn't forget about concurrency and parallelism. I don't see anything talking about this in the iBook.

They link over to this site from the Apple page about Swift http://swift-lang.org/ - I couldn't tell if they are the same thing or if Apple Swift is just based off of this..?

your trolling.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#794

Post by krsna »

Udo wrote: post #2

As someone who always disliked Objective C, I think Swift looks very promising. I'll check it out right away :) Software-wise, I feel these current WWDC announcements are the most exciting in years. Looking at the Swift docs right now, I can see many interesting inspirations at work: there's some Lua/Go in there (multiple return values), some Ruby (closure passed as the last argument to a function can appear immediat…

I agree that Swift looks quite promising, though I'm a bit surprised that it doesn't offer any concurrency primitives like Go does. I only say this because "The Swift Programming Language" e-book claims that "it’s designed to scale from 'hello, world' to an entire operating system."

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#795

Post by sirdogealot »

Me (running arch linux): Oooh! I'd love to learn a new language. And great, they have a free ebook it looks like to describe it!

Apple: To download Apple Inc.’s 'The Swift Programming Language', you need to have iTunes.

Me: What?

Apple: Using a 64-bit edition of Windows? On a Mac?

Me: No.

That experience just killed a potential programmer for you right there, Apple.

I had a few hours to kill, and was pumped to jump on the next apple cash cow and help us both, but you literally killed my ability to download the manual or learn anything more about it for a few days, by which time I'll probably be onto something else.

They have this: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/reference... But it doesn't look nearly as in depth as the ebook would be.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#797

Post by tel »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #658
kibwen wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh hello again, Pacabel. I'm familiar with your game by now. :) We're not scared in the slightest. I'll reconsider when Swift has inline ASM, allocators, linear types, move semantics by default, region analysis, and a type system that guarantees freedom from data races (oh, and when the code is open-sourced, and targets both Linux and Windows as a first-class citizen). Swift isn't intended to be a systems language: i…

I saw a lot of people mention ADT in relation to Swift but I haven't found examples in the documentation book I downloaded from Apple. Would you be kind enough to provide the example you saw? EDIT: My bad, page 40 in the section about protocols (unless I'm missing something).

It's on the bottom half of the page about enumerations. Typically languages have product types, but lack true sum types. Swift's enums provide such leverage.

That said, Swift's types are a bit less than recursive, so there's a bit of niggling still before you get to the affordances of something like Haskell's `data`.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#798

Post by dbaupp »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #755
vor_ wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Swift isn't intended to be a systems language: it's an application language. It may not be ready as a systems language in its pre-1.0 form, but the Swift book claims that it's "designed to scale gracefully from ‘Hello World’ to an entire operating system", so Apple appears to have big goals.

I'm thinking about starting the "Rust contributor points out how Rust is a systems language and $language is an applications language" drinking game. At least now they'll focus on Swift instead of Go. I don't mean this to be rude; I've just noticed a similar set of usernames in threads about certain !Rust languages playing the underdog position and always feeling like they need to compare. Given Rust's PR, speaking o…

Rust is not a functional programming language. Your friend is just wrong for taking you to task about that.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#799

Post by keithwarren »

500+ comments and the term asynchronous does not appear once. It is a platform pain point, several languages have baked in support for async scenarios and Apple comes up with a whole new language, ignores it and a forum full of language geeks talks about it and no one points out it is missing.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#800

Post by angersock »

jernfrost wrote: post #686
angersock wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really that impressed--it looks like a hodgepodge of ideas from ES6, Ruby, Go, and maybe Rust, with a bit of backend work done to let it work on their existing infrastructure. I dislike that Apple has continued the special snowflake approach, that for some reason we as developers need to learn yet another different-but-almost-the-same language to develop for them, instead of just adding proper support and doc…

There is already MacRuby and RubyMotion. They tried using Java years ago. It failed. Developers didn't like it. Existing stuff simply doesn't mix that well with Cocoa and that style of programming. That is why something like Swift was needed. I really don't get why you can bring up languages such as Rust and Go, and complain about Apple's special snowflake approach. Suddenly Apple is doing something developers have b…

Suddenly Apple is doing something developers have been demanding from them for years and something lots of other companies like Google, Mozila and Microsoft has already done.

And yet they've decided to do it again, with yet another incompatible language! Joy of joys!

(And as for Java, it was my understanding that Apple had hobbled it by refusing to release updates on a timely basis.)

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