Why Coders Are Going Nuts Over Apple’s New Programming Language | Hacker News Reader

Why Coders Are Going Nuts Over Apple’s New Programming Language

wired.com

13 pointsLibertatea10 comments

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People at the WWDC showed enthusiasm; I'd hardly call this "coders" as if it encompassed the entire coding ecosystem.

I find it interesting, but a majority of what I'm reading from others indicates:

* It's interesting

* It feels like Go.

* It borrows heavily from Rust

but the biggest thing...

* It's better than Objective-C

But then, this is Wired.

Yeah, maybe to Wired it makes sense to say "they should have just used Python or Ruby". No doubt those languages can be optimized just as well. Lol, why would that be hard?

>It's better than Objective-C

This is pretty much the only thing we (programmers) at my work were talking about yesterday. The language itself is pretty neat but not really anything groundbreaking. The fact that you can code iOS without using Objective-C or busting down to the C++ level is really great news though.

I've been doing this (writing for iOS without using Objective C) for a long time now using Xamarin, so my reaction to the announcement was along the lines of "oh, that's cute."

> For both Larson and Pollak, one of Swift’s biggest advantages over Objective-C is that it does what’s called “automatic garbage collection.” Basically, this means that it will automatically dispose of unneeded information that’s sitting in a machine’s memory, and the result is that developers won’t have to spend a lot of time and energy trying to deal with memory management on their own. This is the primary reason that Larson believes Swift can reach a much larger number of developers.

Ummm... Automatic Reference Counting is not new to Swift (nor is it "garbage collection"), and has been part of Objective-C since 2011.

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...

> With something that Apple calls an “interactive playground,” Swift is even exploring a highly visual kind of programming that may go beyond other mainstream languages

I thought the "interactive playground" was just a REPL, is it something more?

There's apparently some form of Bret Victor-ish "modify code, see impact on program on the fly" thing going on with the playground. Can't provide details or links, just what I read.

Yes, it's more than a REPL.

It doesn't work at the level of single expressions. It's more like a script editor that re-runs the script in realtime, as it's edited. It also allows real-time inspection of values, with useful visual representations (e.g. graphs of values over time, colours, paths, images etc.)

It's pretty cool, though I'm not sure how much use it is over a regular debugger for an experienced programmer. Great for playing around with though.

So like iPython notebook?

So... like a smalltalk environment? Or something like jsfiddle for javascript?

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