I love Swift, and I love Kotlin.
To any young programmer out there (I'm in my fifties), learn these two languages and you will be highly employable for the next decade, on top of the wave.
1) Learning new concepts in computer science. For example Swift uses a lot of modern concepts around type safety, closures, parallelism, synchronization, etc. These are a big learning curve but they are not specific to Swift and you'll notice other modern languages are adopting the same concepts.
2) The UI frameworks are fundamentally different. If you're an option expert at XCode constraints, storyboards, etc, none of the applies to android and vice versa.
I can tell you this, if you do bite the bullet and learn both very well you'll be surprised how much it helps you learn other systems more quickly because you've see all the concepts before.
None of those things seem particularly modern to me. Does swift actually have any concepts that weren't already implemented in other languages by say, 1980?
It might seem like I'm being pedantic, but the flip side is - why not learn older, simpler, more mature languages that already have those concepts?
Modern for mainstream languages. Non-mainstream languages are irrelevant to the discussion, since nobody cares about theme except niche industries, hobbyists and academics...
>but the flip side is - why not learn older, simpler, more mature languages that already have those concepts?
Because those languages are not tied to a $50 billion app industry or have major adoption and increased support.
TIL that ML is ooold.
For example, node.js, many people say its popular because lots or webdevs knew JS already, but that's not even close to true, most people went to node.js because they found a couple of usable libraries on npm that gave the trust necessary to start the project.
Ada. [0]
It's been around since before '83 (when it became an ANSI standard), and was developed for the DOD, to replace the hodge podge of languages they were using, with an emphasis on safety.
It has all the above, whilst focusing on being plain English.
Ada also has a few things that are considered to be fairly modern, and has had them for a long time. Such as:
* No Primitive Data Types
* Type Contracts
* Subtyping, operator overloading
The more languages change... The more they stay the same.
These concepts aren't new.
Ada was a beautiful design for its time. Maybe its most fundamental flaw was government oversight. So much about designing a widely successful language is non-technical, choosing the right features, trends, hardware, that builds enough momentum to support a self-sustaining ecosystem. To do so often requires an agility that the DOD just doesn't have. Ada is one of so many examples that reminds us technical superiority commonly loses out to pragmatism.
I do like the name, it would have been fascinating to know Ada Lovelace.
But, if you insist:
> Ada does not have parametric polymorphism.
Yes, it does. [1][2] It's supported through the use of generic units.
> Ada does not have ... algebraic data types
Ada does have tagged records, and other variant types, and has had for quite some time. [0] They aren't quite Sum Types, but are incredibly close.
> Ada does not have... Objective-C interoperability
GNAT does. It's part of the GNU Compiler Collection, and as such, can be linked against other languages supported by the toolchain. GCC also supports Objective-C.
[0] http://archive.adaic.com/standards/83rat/html/ratl-04-07.htm...
[1] https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Parametric_polymorphism#Ada
[2] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Generics#Param...
Yay! :-)
One thing that's probably almost unknown these days is that Objective-<X> was always supposed to be something you can easily add to any <X>, and in fact there were quite a few of these, including Objective-Assembler.
Ada 2012 probably even has more generic data containers on their standard library than Swift.
ADTs can be done via tagged records.
That's interesting, I did not know that.
From a quick glance it appears they do not have bounded polymorphism ("protocol-constrained generic parameters"), associated types, or existential types ("values of protocol type"). So for example if you have a generic Set data type you would have to pass in an equality and hash function to each operation instead of saying that the element type is Hashable, etc.
The explicit instantiation looks quaint, but it reminds me of ML functors for some reason:
procedure Instance_Swap is new Swap (Float);You can use abstract classes and interfaces for that.
They wanted something safe for embedded, and the original specification in '83 included generics, so you could handle data structures in a nice, safe, performant manner.
What does Swift have in terms of parallelism/concurrency?
To be honest, I would've said going deep on JavaScript right now (React, React Native, etc) would give you a shelf life of at least five years.
Kotlin seems like a bit of a random recommendation - it's not in the TIOBE top 50, and a quick search for Kotlin jobs on indeed.com (the first job search site I found from Google) reveals several orders of magnitude fewer jobs than for anything mainstream (hell, even Haskell beats it comprehensively). Perhaps it's the next big thing though!
Already there are large apps that are built around React Native. But more importantly, js as a language is becoming indispensable.
A few days ago, there was a discussion about Netflix - who specifically re-engineered it's back end infrastructure to let it's app engineers (who are js) write API services in nodejs. We are talking 40% of The Internet here ?
There is a large boost in hive mind productivity with one programming language . If Java 9 Truffle/Graal.js is as good as everyone says, then it is pretty much js all the way down.
And for those who think js is a shitty language (god knows I did), please try out ES2017 or Typescript - you will be pleasantly surprised.
Because "they already knew js". I know that Hystrix is still core, but IMHO the shift has started.