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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

I really don't get why people stress over this.

Swift only has value with the Mac OS X and iOS ecosystems, specially as a mean to drag Objective-C developers into the FP world.

There are so many open source languages in the ML family, a few of them are even used in the industry for several years now. Just go and join one of those projects.

They will appreciate any help they can get.

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Also remember that Swift is already starting to be taught in schools. Imagine if a natural language that is taught in schools was tied to a single company. If, for example, you needed an Apple pen to write English. How much of literature would we have missed out on? Would Shakespeare have been able to afford an Apple pen? Thankfully, we never have to find out ;)

When I graduated, we had to buy our compilers...

>There are so many open source languages in the ML family, a few of them are even used in the industry for several years now. Just go and join one of those projects.

Well, some people like the decisions behind Swift, and would prefer a language with an ecosystem, documentation and developer community of the size that results from Apple being involved in it compared to, say, Jane Street.

Heck, people also use Go mostly because of the Google involvement (and the momentum that gives), and it's a language 30 years behind Swift.

> it's a language 30 years behind Swift.

Interesting idea. Can you post a link that explains why that is?

I guess because the Go creators didn't study much (or cared about) the last decades of language research. Heck, the major language they were involved and associated with, C, wasn't that "current" even at the time when it appeared, just pragmatic in a "worse is better" way and readily available. They were every influencial systems guys, with C, Unix, Plan 9, etc, but not really big PL/Compiler guys.

Now, Swift is pragmatic too, and far from cutting edge, but still ways ahead of Go in that area, and its creator is a very strong player in the field of compilers (he also did LLVM).

Here's a link that shows how much hasn't changed:

http://cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/

Robe Pike seems to like to lament the fact that systems research is irrelevant. Well, PL research sure seems to be irrelevant - either something he is largely unaware of, or doesn't feel he needs - to him.

Except for its concurrency model (and it's an open question whether having a concurrency model built right into a language is even a good thing; it's certainly not a no-caveats win), Go is really, really conservative in design. Swift, by contrast, has adopted concepts left right and centre; there's nothing particularly novel, but it's certainly far more adventurous.

> Swift only has value with the Mac OS X and iOS ecosystems

And .NET only had value in the MS world before Mono which very popular.

Windows developers have fully embraced it since the early days, most of them don't care about Mono.

I wonder if their plan for the Indie Phone is to run recompiled iOS apps on GNUstep. Swift would have a lot of value in that case.

GNUStep is frozen in Panther, last time I checked.

There is hardly any modern Mac application that you can compile with it.

>Swift only has value with the Mac OS X and iOS ecosystems

Which is why they are making an open source version that will have value in all ecosystems.

For those looking for an ML language outside the Apple ecosystem there is OCaml, Haskell, F#, ATS, Rust, Idris, Pure Script, Elm, ...

Swift without Cocoa, UIkit, GCD, Playground, IDE support..., doesn't offer anything better than those MLs.

I would be curious to know if the authors of this feels that there is something that Swift can give them that some other ML-like or whatever language can't, if we disregard any ties to the Apple platform and ecosystem.

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