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posted by martyb on Sunday June 14 2015, @10:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the swift-rise-in-popularity dept.

The hype around Swift is near non-existent by Apple standards, yet the language has attracted high praise since its release last year. Swift is essentially one of the very few Apple products representing a clear departure from the hardware-led approach Steve Jobs took to the business. If Stack Overflow's 2015 dev survey is anything to go by, it looks as if the Swift language might have potential to really shake things up.

Might the days of Apple programmers relying upon objective C be numbered?


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday June 15 2015, @11:25AM

    by PizzaRollPlinkett (4512) on Monday June 15 2015, @11:25AM (#196433)

    I'm not against Swift. I want to like it. The problem is that if you're not an Apple developer, it's just Yet Another Language to throw into the pile with all the other new languages. Even if Swift is great, and even if the open source (notice they don't call it free software) version catches on, it's still yet another language competing with all the other languages. Used to be that new languages could be kind of exciting. Fun to learn. These days, though, there's a new language every few months, and nothing compelling to distinguish them. I try to use as few languages as possible, because the syntax is all basically the same, but different. It's cognitively hard to switch from one language to another, because you know exactly what you want to do, but don't remember the exact syntax. The idea of trying to learn yet another language with the same basic syntax but all the minor variations in how to do things is a pain I don't need. Swift would have to do something so revolutionary great that I couldn't live without it for me to spend time on it.

    Why not go back to industry standards? Whatever great things Swift does, why can't these great things be added to an existing language rather than creating a whole new language? Especially since there is a "shortage" of developers. Maybe the shortage wouldn't be as bad if we used industry standards and skills were more easily transferable.

    The argument against adding to an existing language is, of course, C++. Lambdas, for example, were added in a way that makes me wish they had just scrapped it and started over. The syntax is hideous. So I can see why people want to start over with a clean slate. The problem right now is there are too many of these false starts, and programmers don't have the cognitive space to handle all these languages.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @02:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @02:15PM (#196491)

    Not typing your variables isn't natural!!!