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The Swift Programming Language

developer.apple.com

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Re: The Swift Programming Language

#951

Post by taharvey »

angersock wrote: post #393
nlh wrote: post #37

I'm not even an iOS developer but this is by far the most exciting thing I heard in the keynote. As an amatuer/hobbyist programmer who's self-taught with Ruby, JavaScript, etc., the one thing that was keeping me from experimenting with iOS apps was Objective-C. I know I could tackle it, but it's been hard to take the plunge. I don't know much about Swift yet, but from what I've seen it looks very exciting. So if Appl…

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…

What about the special snowflake projects of google, mozilla, or sun? Apples language development is no less valid than google developing Go, or mozilla developing rust. This just shows your inherent bias.

I've been amazed recently how many open-source projects that we rolled into our linux product were Apple sourced: LLVM, Clang, libdispatch, webkit, OpenCL, zeroConf. Can't think of anything google has done for me recently.

And if there is anyone who will knock-this out of the park, its Chris Lattner. LLVM, Clang, and openCL is all him. He has done more for compiler tech than anyone in 30 years.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#952

Post by taharvey »

andybak wrote: post #186

I'm reading the manual and liking nearly everything. But then I stumble across: > Alternatively, remove a key-value pair from a dictionary with the removeValueForKey method. Is that the day where an Objective-C got to choose method names? Why not dict.delete() or similar?

You mean an API than you can actually read and understand? How dare them take your 1970s 80-char display away from you!

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#953

Post by taharvey »

mathattack wrote: post #788
reuven wrote: post #739

I find it a bit sad that with all of the languages that already exist, Apple found it necessary to invent a completely new one -- and then make it proprietary. Why not use Ruby, or Python, or JavaScript -- or even Go, Rust, Clojure, or Scala? (Yes, I realize that the latter two run on the JVM, which would have been problematic in other ways.) Heck, they could have bought RubyMotion and made Ruby the high-level langua…

My sense is they wanted "Their" language, as opposed to Go (Google) or Java (Oracle) or another tied in to a vendor.

Why does Google get kudos for inventing new languages (Go), and Apple gets mocked? (Swift)

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#954

Post by oldguysrule »

Touche wrote: post #382
te_chris wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the hate. Yeah, syntax is unfamiliar, bu once I got used to it I began to really enjoy objective-c. Ymmv etc., but it's now one of my fav languages - though I guess this is mostly due to cocoa

You may not hate Objective-C, but I doubt you love it either. Have you / would you ever use Objective-C to write a web back-end? To write a command-line tool?

I got started with WebObjects, a Next product a couple years before Apple bought them. Yes I've written wonderfully powerful web applications in Objective-C back when the rest of the web was being built using CGI and Perl scripts.

I loved Smalltalk and I love Objective-C at a deep level. The Objective-C runtime is incredibly powerful and its method dispatch is astonishingly efficient considering what it does. It is not as fast as vtables, but it isn't as fragile either.

It might well interest you to know that WebObjects (I'm talking 1997 here) ran on HP-UX, SunOS, AIX, and one other popular Unix of the day that slips my mind and it too shipped with a lively scripting language called WebScript which was not so different from a minimal Swift today.

The thing is, once you dig into the Objective-C runtime and spend a bit of time trying to write an interpreter, you start to realize that the interpreter almost writes itself. Swift is far from the first language built atop the Objective-C runtime.

Consider FScript (http://www.fscript.org) has been around for well over a decade and does more or less the same thing except it gives you something closer to Smalltalk than Javascript and it includes some advanced matrix manipulation goodies as well.

The majority of the people squealing with glee over the introduction to Swift seem to be the sort of people I wouldn't care to work with. If a bit of syntax puts you off so much, lord help you when a truly new paradigm hits.

Swift looks to have some nice features, but it seems to be missing the low level access to the runtime that advanced developers can use like default message handlers (forwardInvocation:/doesNotUnderstand:/methodForSelector: kinds of stuff) and the ability to fiddle method dicts at runtime which can be very useful for intercepting strange errors and unexpected code paths.

So, yes, I do LOVE Objective-C. It is my second favorite language to work in after Smalltalk and to those claiming that Swift will help them move over from Android because it less verbose - lets remember Java is the most boilerplate per capability language I've seen since COBOL. I don't know what those people are talking about.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#955

Post by oldguysrule »

angersock wrote: post #393
nlh wrote: post #37

I'm not even an iOS developer but this is by far the most exciting thing I heard in the keynote. As an amatuer/hobbyist programmer who's self-taught with Ruby, JavaScript, etc., the one thing that was keeping me from experimenting with iOS apps was Objective-C. I know I could tackle it, but it's been hard to take the plunge. I don't know much about Swift yet, but from what I've seen it looks very exciting. So if Appl…

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…

>At least Google had the decency to pick a language everybody was already using and use that.

If you think Java is remotely comparable in power and expressiveness to Objective C, you should probably reconsider your line of work.

The rise in popularity of Java nearly drove me from the industry it is such a verbose half baked pile of garbage. I could fill your browser with things you can do in Objective C that you cannot do in Java at all and this incredible flexibility is why Apple is such an agile company with such limited head count.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#956

Post by robmccoll »

pjmlp wrote: post #849
Pacabel wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what other language can we use today on basically any imaginable platform, while still retaining the extreme degree of control, the excellent interoperability, and the near-optimal runtime performance of C? Some will say Rust, but we're years away from that being realistic. C++, using modern techniques, is perhaps the only feasible response. While there may be some validity to your claim about "billions of human b…

C is dead on Windows and I hope Microsoft does not change its mind. C is almost dead on Android, with its minimal exposure on the NDK and I hope Google does not change its mind about it. C is now being killed on MacOS X and I look forward to Swift's success. So this leaves out the embedded industry (slowly moving to Ada and Java on IoT) and the hardcore UNIX guys.

Hahahah C is dead? Come on, don't start that kind of bating. High-level efficiency-oriented languages are high-level efficiency-oriented languages and low-level performance-oriented languages are low-level performance oriented languages. This has been true and will continue to be true. Notice the number of high-level languages that have waxed and waned while C has continued to flourish...

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#958

Post by Chattered »

tomp wrote: post #870
sriku wrote: post #861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No exceptions. This is a big shift. With such a rich type system (very Hindley-Milner .. even with "protocols" that feel like type classes?), there is no need for exceptions, for much the same reason that Haskell doesn't have exceptions in the core language, but only a monad. This would force error situations to be explicitly modeled in the types of objects returned by functions/methods. A good thing I think. Howev…

I disagree. I use exceptions a lot in OCaml. For example, when implementing a recursive type-checker, you really want to be able to abort (all the recursive invocations) quickly if e.g. you find an undeclared variable or a type error. Using an ADT would IMO incur an unacceptable syntactic and cognitive overhead.

Ocaml exceptions are a misnomer, since they are often used as a control flow primitive for non-exceptional circumstances. The point is that they are cheap. Contrast with Java, where you wouldn't want to use exceptions the way you use them in Ocaml, and would instead favour other non-local exit primitives such as "return", "break" and "continue."

Haskell doesn't care about this stuff, because lazy evaluation gives you the same control-flow patterns, and the exception monad ends up operationally equivalent to checked exceptions, but now with possibly exception throwing values made first-class. I doubt the same can be said of Swift.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#960

Post by wyuenho »

ustolemyname wrote: post #910
wyuenho wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually a new keyword called `fallthrough`.

Interesting definition of 'new' you're using there. http://golang.org/ref/spec#Fallthrough_statements

Ha thanks! It's been a while since I looked at Go. I wish I could edit the comment now!
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