My first instinct was to be cautious about new languages from Apple - Dylan was supposed to be something awesome until Apple cancelled it. But I only learned of the existence of Dylan years after it was cancelled. Looked awesome, but it was so niche I didn't want to spend time learning it.
So I took a moment to look at why Dylan was cancelled.[1] Veryin interesting stuff. What it came down to was:
- Apple was in dire financial straits
- Apple needed to axe all projects that didn't show commercial viability
- At the time, when Apple was transitioning to PowerPC, Dylan was 68K only, and needed another year or two to be ported
- Most damning, the project was not finished - it wasn't even in the optimization stage.
None of these factors are in play here. So. My worries are assuaged. I do want to learn this, and it looks really easy to pick up so far.I'm really curious now about two (unrelated) things:
1) is this good enough to build web apps with? 2) how would one manage the transition of an Obj-C based project to a Swift-based one? Assume I don't have the budget or manpower to perform a ground-up rewrite.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Dylan_programmin...