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Comment by jernfrost | Hacker News Reader

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 been demanding from them for years and something lots of other companies like Google, Mozila and Microsoft has already done. But oh no, because it is Apple, it is all wrong.

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It's unfair to lump Mozilla in with the rest, since Rust isn't at all propriety. It has been open source for a long long time: https://github.com/mozilla/rust

That is not quite right.

The Java/Objective-C bridge existed in the early days as they weren't sure if developers would pick Objective-C, so they decided to bet on two horses.

As Objective-C eventually won the hearts of Mac OS X developers, the bridge was deprecated and a few years later the full Java support.

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.)

> Apple had hobbled it by refusing to release updates on a timely basis.

I can see how they could get tired of being forced to ship almost-monthly updates just to support an extra language with very limited adoption. If you have to make that sort of effort, you'll probably do it for your native tools only (like Microsoft does with .Net). Besides, Java apps on OSX looked better than Java apps on Windows, but they were still recognizably different from Obj-C ones.

I wish somebody would write an OS in Python 3...

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

That's a different, later issue.

Early on in the life of OS X, Apple offered a Java interface to the Cocoa class frameworks. In theory, you could write OS X applications using Java, calling into the Apple frameworks instead of using Swing or whatever Java frameworks.

This wasn't all that well supported, didn't perform well, and wasn't popular.

Sun should simply have hired some mac people and done it themselves. Entrusting the success of your entire company ( they changed their ticker symbol to JAVA!) to a 3rd party vendor's whims was and is silly.

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