Apple releases a series of books with hundreds of pages and hours of video using Swift, and Google releases a one page Google Doc proposing to use Go. And then people wonder why Apple is able to attract so many developers to their platform...
It's got nothing to do with open source. Instead it reflects the different approaches taken by Apple and Google.
Apple designs something new, tries hard to get it right the first time, and commits to it completely. Swift is the way to write for Apple's platforms, period. It's appropriate for a "social media application, all the way up to a high-performance 3D game." There's no doubt that Swift is meant to succeed Objective-C.
Google experiments more, sees what sticks. Go, Dart, Dalvik, v8, NaCl... You sure have lots of choices, but the relationships between these technologies is unclear, and has the character of uncoordinated teams working in isolation.
While Go is a feasible replacement for C/C++ for native parts of Android applications (which are just normal Linux .so libraries linked against bionic) it would be a terrible fit for main application language without a full rewrite of most of the operating system (note that ART is certainly NOT a magic bullet here!). Note here that native (NDK) code has practically NO access to Android OS APIs (only APIs available are bitmap manipulation, OpenGL, OpenAL and limited sensors access).
It's staggering just how many misconceptions and lack of understanding of Android structure is there in those "Go for Android" threads.
For us Android devs pretty much three points would improve the Android development experience:
1.) Add Java 8 language feature support to ART/Dalvik runtime. This would clean up code immensely, especially in so concurrency and callback heavy use-case as a mobile app is.
2.) Clean up Android APIs and fix broken implementations. Add modern block/callback based APIs to replace listener-heavy code. Perhaps look at RxJava design patterns for core Android APIs as well.
3.) Improve tooling. Not the code editors (IDEA/AS with Maven or Gradle are decent enough), but the profiling tools, hiearchy viewer, tracing tools and other tooling which wasn't touched in years and are SORELY needed for good app development. Figuring out why a certain animation stutters right now requires stitching together several partially working tools with poor documentation.
Note that NONE of those issues would be improved by adding Go as a language to interact with Android and would just cause additional issues on Go/Java boundaries.
As for IDEs, personally I grew to prefer Android Studio to Visual Studio (well, no ReSharper), although I have much more working experience with the latter. Especially in terms of navigating around the project. VS native refactoring tools are very rudimentary, too, even in VS 2013 - not much seems to have changed in YEARS.
In short, what I'm saying is, that at the current state of Android, implementing Java 8 features would bring simillar benefits than switching to a whole other language without having to rewrite whole runtime and most of the operating system.
Oh really? That must be why they removed all of their USB and HDMI ports to replace them with Thunderbolt ports. Anyway, let me get back to writing my IOS apps in AppleScript and hosting my website on my Xserve. While I'm doing that I'll being sharing my music listening habits will all of my friends on Ping.
The point of that is that they hardly ever commit to things as 'completely' as you imply. They just have a conservative marketing strategy where they won't release anything until much later than most companies would.
That doesn't even make sense. Thunderbolt and USB/HDMI cater to different needs. When they added thunderbolt they DID take out their Firewire ports. And when they added USB they did take out legacy mouse, keyboard etc ports.
>Anyway, let me get back to writing my IOS apps in AppleScript
Again, doesn't even make sense. Applescript is a legacy language they maintain. Designed pre-OS X. Not something they actively designed for iOS or anything.
>and hosting my website on my Xserve
They would, if enough people were interested. They weren't, so they killed the product. Same for ping.
Quite the opposite.
Wouldn't there be more people to write books and to work on SDKs when a language is openly developed?
Android is fairly open. You can run whatever you want on that platform. If you want to use LuaJIT, no one can stop you.
Also, this isn't "Google". It's one guy working for Google. He's on the Go team. He wants to make Go a viable option for games on Android.
If you like Go, this is a good thing.
go language spec hit #1:
dart language spec hit #1:
https://www.dartlang.org/docs/spec/
java language spec hit #1:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/
For Swift, I can only find guides and references.
https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...
"The grammar described here is intended to help you understand the language in more detail, rather than to allow you to directly implement a parser or compiler."
A language specification is for people who want to implement a parser/compiler/VM/etc. It's something you need if you want to standardize it (e.g. TC39 [ECMAScript] and TC52 [Dart]).
A language specification is also generally clearly labeled as such.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_specificat...
PHP, for example, doesn't have one.
Edit: I forgot to mention that both Go and Java lack ECMA and ISO specs.
There are quite a few more Android developers than iOS ones, not sure what point you are trying to make.
Go will probably have zero impact on Android but Java has certainly been instrumental to Android's success.
Around here (Central Europe, Austria) it's the other way around. It's a little bit harder to find good Android jobs than iOS jobs.
Maybe because Java has always been one of the more popular languages here and the amount of Android devs is just higher than the number of iOS devs.
But I agree, finding a good Android developer here in central europe is rather hard. Also finding a good Android job is rather hard - payment offers are usually atrociously bad.
Do you have a source for this? My observation is that it's much easier to hire iOS developers than Android developers.
Go in this case is seen sort of an in-between C and Java. But Go is not really as fast as C as much as we want it to be. So I don't know. Maybe it will be useful for something already written in Go to be ported. But I would rather see Dart succeed as a higher level-than java development language (both on Android and on the Web).
Years back I hoped Python would do that (being Guido was at Google and all). But as he confessed there was a minor political struggle internally over it and Guido lost. Not too long after he left Google.
Because of the phones and batteries, AOT languages are more valued and even ordinary jitted languages are getting a AOT compiler.. ART for Java and even .Net
So Dart would need to have a AOT compiler first to make it more appealing to mobile phones.. also i think a lot of apps would not like to be distributed in source code form..
So langs like Go now are on the rise.. its funny how technology trends change over the decades... not while ago it was all about dinamic languages..
Eg. Basic, Javascript, Objetive-C
As i dont think people actually conciously choose to write in those languages because of its features.. thats why we have so many people grumpy about those technologies..
Languages that we choose because of better features, pretty often loose in popularity and adoption..
Sometimes those languages have some heroic comunity efforts and a vibrant community that can make it stand.. but this is pretty rare.. Python, Ruby(because of Rails)
It has almost the same mechanics of the fashion industry.. Some influential people decide what we gonna wear on the next 5 years..
We can use our "hobby language" of choice, because its our own decision.. but in the end of the day.. we have to mantain and work in code on those languages missing the "features, abstraction power and maximized interactivity" we love so much
Incorrect, or at least badly lacking historical context and perspective.
Basic: interactive. (Primitive REPL.)
Javascript: it was there. If it wasn't there, everywhere but influential people just wrote about it then it would have languished. Also, it is interactive.
Objective-C: has a lot of very good OO which was heavily influenced by Smalltalk. It is precisely the OO excellence that it was known for and which engendered fierce love for it in certain circles.
Remember also that these languages have been around for a long time, on hardware far less powerful than what we have today or even had a decade ago. The youngest of these languages is Javascript by far, and it is almost 20 tears old! For their day, they were advanced with respect to the programming mainstream by at least one measure. (In the Apple II days, BASIC was there, and it was interactive, and that was enough.)
I'm not saying these were the best available. But there is more to it than just fashion and influence/hype. (Otherwise we'd all just be using Java in the browser and for app servers.)
Also: Ruby was a hobby language once upon a time.