Why Apple’s Swift Language Will Instantly Remake Computer Programming

It's not a great article, but the author had access to Chris Lattner, who is a legit bad-ass that I enjoy reading about.

The very next paragraph-

"...an enormous number of programmers have an immediate reason to use Swift. Today, hundreds of thousands of developers build apps for iPhones and iPads using a language called Objective-C, and due to the immense popularity of Apple’s consumer gadgets, these coders will keep building such apps. But Swift is a significant improvement over Objective-C—in many respects—and this means the already enormous community of iPhone and iPad developers are sure to embrace the new language in the months to come."

It's kind of irrelevant. Yes, Swift will become quite popular overnight because it will soon be the defacto way to write iOS and Mac apps. Go is struggling because it hasn't found its "reason to be" with most people. Of course this doesn't mean that Swift is better than any particular language. If Google adopted Go on Android, for example, its popularity would surge

+1. I will merrily skip any submission with a sensationalistic headline, together with those that read like "Why you need to stop doing X, and do Y instead". I don't know how everybody else feels about this, but I'm sick of stupid headlines on HN.

I understand they help to sell, but I decided to cut down dramatically on the amount of time I spend reading about shit some random guy on the Internet thinks I absolutely need to {stop,begin,avoid} doing, and this rule of thumb helps quite a bit.

Sad to say, I guess that the vast majority of the stuff we read won't make our life appreciably better.

That being said, one might sure find entertainment value in a certain kind of submissions.

Yup, Wired is still trying to generate hype for languages they don't understand.

"Increase article pageviews with this One Weird Trick!"

I bet such headlines are good for business in the short term. They are slowly selling their credibility for page views.

Yeah but I get it with libraries: you've gotta provide compatibility so preserving old ways of doing things is fine. With a new language like this, it's just making one of the biggest problems with Objective C even worse.

I don't have much experience in writing iOs apps, but the impression I always had is that the language is not nearly as important as it seems, to that end.

Regardless of the language, the important (and most difficult) part is getting used to iOS framework, the patterns and models it uses, not to mention all the UI widgets and how they interact with each other.

I don't think Swift will make it easier to deal with all that, regardless of how well has been thought out.

Well, precisely. But there are a number of existing languages that would also be better than objective-c. And they had the benefit of pre-existing.

Like with C#, a language "officially sanctioned language for the ... ecosystem" is not going to be a radical experiment, it will reflect proven wins.

So it seems that apple made the decision that the benefits of rolling their own take on the current state of the art outweighed the costs associated with rolling their own.

I don't consider the "let" example to really be very Perlish. The real power of Perl in it's natural expressiveness is to more closely map speaking, and thus thinking patterns to how the algorithm is represented. For example, postconditionals, which allow a single statement to be conditional based on a condition that immediately follows it. This is a natural way people express themselves ("do X if Y" or "do A unless B"), but it is wisely restricted to a single statement as the alternative is less common, less clear. The fact that swift's let statement sounds like common English when spoken aloud is only superficially similar to Perl, IMHO.

Additionally some sort of hash/associative array/map data structure at the top level is (thankfully) common at this point.

I haven't followed swift too closely though, so maybe there's other stuff that I would consider more aligned with the spirit of Perl.

I think let for bindings actually comes from ML. It looks a lot like what you get when you try to take what you can from functional languages while still being an imperative language.

> And like Perl, I also like that associative arrays / dictionaries are top level:

    let people = ["Anna": 67, "Beto": 8, "Jack": 33, "Sam": 25]

Is this a perl-ism? It's not much more inference than C#:

    var people = new Dictionary<string, int> {{"Anna", 37}, {"Beto", 8}};

or a JavaScript array of objects.

Also "+= " on strings extends beyond just JS (it works in C# too) and likely several others.

Whichever more modern language you're familiar with, you'll probably see an echo of it there.

This is quite a weird idea, really. Even if Swift were open sourced (and it looks like it may be at some point: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.clang.devel/37...), would it _really_ be all that dramatically useful on, say, Android? Good luck making your GUI app through the JNI. There are a few Objective C apps on Android, but they're pretty much universally games (there's a Spritekit port).

It doesn't really change the story for developing cross-platform apps at all.

Funny, lock-in is the reason why I won't use it.

Or a lock-out. If a language is multi-platform you have a lot more potential developers than if it is single platform.

He who dies with the most cash wins? It's definitely a nice position to be in but money obviously doesn't think up new products.

What was the last true innovation from Apple? I claim it was the iPod. The miniaturization of music. Everything since the iPod has been purely derivative of that miniaturization theme.

They've ridden the "Miniaturize all the things" wave hard (and successfully) by adding more features like accelerometers, GPS, faster chips, more colors, etc. to keep the fanboys horny but nobody has been really impressed with a new iDevice for quite some time. Apple is getting stale.

Apple needs a new hardware win that shows that they haven't exhausted their idea bank AND that they still have the marketing savvy to make people want what they've got.

Apple has NEVER been a software company. They are definitely struggling if Swift is the best new things they could come up with.

Where's the hardware?

<crickets>

> In theory yes, but in practice no. It's constructed around a solid core of the Objective C object model and runtime.

Not sure I agree. You won't be making a Cocoa UI in it or anything, but if they open source the compiler and modifications to the Objective C runtime, along with the standard library (which is really light right now; you have to use Cocoa for very simple things), it should be useful enough, with GNUStep.

Thanks for this! I couldn't find one without it wanting me to pay when I looked in the middle of last week. I don't do native iOS/cocoa so I felt it'd be kind of skeezy to have work pay for it.

Sorry, i can't find a download for Linux, so how is this supposed to take over the world? :(