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Comment by blazespin | Hacker News Reader

Wake me up when they open source it like they said they were going to. Proprietary languages are evil acts of lock-in committed against unwary junior developers. Swift is a great language, but I'd really like my skills to be somewhat transportable.

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"Swift is a great language, but I'd really like my skills to be somewhat transportable."

If your skills are locked in to a certain language then you're doing it wrong.

9/10, given two coders of the same talent, I'll always hire the one with the experience in the language/framework. But I hire for velocity - ie, people who can develop productized solutions (bug free) in a short period of time. People who know the theory but not the in the trenches reality, well, you don't need that many folks.

Apple open sourcing Swift is not magically goingto make your skills transportable.

The only person who can make your skills transportable is yourself.

Yep! And the way to do that is stay away from proprietary technologies wherever possible.

Then you're limiting the amount of skills you possess.

Learn open source and proprietary technologies alike, now you become someone with a lot of diverse skills.

This open source fanboyism makes no sense if you want to be professional about your craft.

You have to limit what are you going to learn, otherwise you will have no time to build anything. So you have to pick carefully.

Generally, the open technologies were proved to be useful in long-term, and even when they change, they change evolutionary. You don't have big bumps and complete u-turns in your progress.

There is also no-one, who suddenly decides that the technology you were invested into is suddenly not profitable for them and ceases development. The open source technologies die only then, when they are not useful to anyone.

So basically, strong preference for open technologies is a pragmatic risk mitigation and investment protection.

Hello German friend,

> So basically, strong preference for open technologies is a pragmatic risk mitigation and investment protection.

.net and Microsoft technologies completely invalidate that claim, don't you think?

Nope, i wont touch them either for the same reason. Although ms is starting to get its act together and open sourcing parts of its ecosystem. Anyway who would write a net application on windows, they would need thier head seeing to.

Perhaps the Swift conference end of October?

Coupled with the amazing NeXTBSD work that's spun up, I've found myself surprisingly excited about what Swift might become.

I'm guessing they'll announce open source Swift at the next llvm conference this fall.

Which makes me think you aren't doing any iOS or Mac OS X development anyway. So the state of Swift openness doesn't matter.

So go pick OCaml, Haskell, Rust, Idris,.... instead.

>Swift is a great language, but I'd really like my skills to be somewhat transportable.

Huh?

I think OP is talking about multi platform code. Swift isn't "write once compile anywhere" like C or C++. This is also the reason I haven't used it yet, although I read the swift book and I'm looking forward to multiplatform capabilities (if that were to happen)

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