Wow. It's really too bad what Wired's editors did with this headline. The story is not nearly as bad as they made it sound.
"Google unveiled a language called Go in 2009, and though it was designed by some of the biggest names in the history of software design—Ken Thompson and Rob Pike—it’s still struggling to gain a major following among the world’s coders. But Swift is a different animal. When it’s officially released this fall, it could achieve mass adoption with unprecedented speed, surpassing even the uptake of Sun Microsystems’ Java programming language and Microsoft’s C# in the late 1990s and early 2000s."
I didn't note any mention of the fact that Objective-C and now Swift are (to a first approximation) the only ways of writing apps for Apple's major products. Go is struggling? They're comparing it to Java, a language intended for universal use, and it hasn't been released yet?
"...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."
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.
Thanks for the pointer, I will give the story a chance.