

Not so swift - rquantz
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/06/apple_wwdc_2014_the_company_introduces_a_new_programming_language_called.html

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krig
Wow, what a terrible article. First of all, the obvious biases of the author
as an ex-Googler and java programmer shine through strong enough to make you
blind, but the arguments he puts forward are just awful.

Really, java is leaps and bounds better than Objective-C? That must be why all
those java feature-phones were such wonders to program for, and why android
apps are so much more responsive and well-designed than iOS apps. Or maybe,
that's simply not the case, and the language hasn't been that much of an issue
for developers. On the contrary, binary compatibility with C and C++ has made
it trivial for game developers to port their games and engines to iOS, whereas
it took years for Google to belatedly release a native SDK for android.

Are android developers really less miserable than iOS developers? I've
developed for both. Rather, I've looked at developing for the hodge-podge mess
of vendors, phone sizes, capabilities and general horror of Android and fled
from it screaming, while I've released apps on the app store despite not
really buying into the walled garden of apple. It's just too easy to make apps
on that platform.

"Rust creator Graydon Hoare points out that Swift “appears to have
‘Objective-C object model interop’ as a hard design constraint.” In English,
that means Apple decided that Swift still needed to look as much like
Objective-C as possible, wherever possible."

That's just not at all what that sentence means. Hoare is talking about
binary/runtime interop, not language design.

I really doubt the creators of Go would stand behind the claims made in this
article. Swift is a very impressive first release of a new programming
language regardless of who is behind it, especially one that achieves binary
compatibility with C (how many other modern languages manage that? Go doesn't.
It needs a special C compiler for seamless interop.). Yes, the proprietary
nature of it is worrying and potentially a limiting factor for the success of
Swift. Every other claim this article makes is utter nonsense.

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jcizzle
At a certain point, we'll collectively have to realize that the people who
jump to write opinionated articles on a technology that is 2 days old probably
don't have a lot of facts or an opinion worth reading.

Until that day, this guy will have a job.

~~~
Intermernet
So far, every article I've read about Swift has been opinionated. Should they
all not have been written? I actually agree, but this could be said about
pretty much all tech journalism. If it's more than 2 days old, it's old news.

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7851900
The author comes across as someone who has grown a little older and is now so
stuck in their old way of doing things that they become ignorant and oblivious
to improvements.

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alayne
Another terrible link bait article.

~~~
mrcwinn
It is link bait, and it's not the first time Slate has done this. Take this as
an example:

"Is There Any Truth to the Claim That Einstein Was a Fraud?"

To summarize the article: "no."

Here's an entire article on Slate's link bait tendencies:
[http://matthewdicks.com/2013/11/benedikt-ridiculous-
offensiv...](http://matthewdicks.com/2013/11/benedikt-ridiculous-
offensive.html)

As for Swift, which Slate compares to Clojure, OCaml, and Scala, one
difference is that exactly _none_ of those languages have native support for
Cocoa APIs, something you might care a lot about if you're an iOS or OS X
developer.

Swift is new, but Slate is not. Total nonsense.

[1]
[http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2014/03/18/is_there_any_tru...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2014/03/18/is_there_any_truth_to_the_claim_that_einstein_was_a_fraud.html)

~~~
Intermernet
I agree completely regarding Slate and their tendency for sensationalist
headlines, but I think the author's point regarding Clojure et al is that
Apple _could_ have provided native Cocoa APIs for all of those languages, but
they chose to develop Swift instead. At that point, IOS or OS X devs could
have used any or all of the listed languages that had official APIs.

I suppose time will tell if they made a good choice there, but I tend to think
that open source languages will always win over proprietary languages, as they
can adapt faster, and get much larger community adoption. It's a pity, because
Swift looks pretty nice.

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vincetogo
I really don't get where the hate for Objective-C is coming from. Objective-C
is definitely showing its age and I'm glad to see a new language that improves
on it, but I really don't understand why the author's slagging it so much.
I've worked in Java and Obj-C and I'd much rather work with the latter any
day. I'm not saying it's perfect by any stretch, and I'm not saying it's
objectively better than Java, just that there's a case for both. But I
definitely don't think iOS would have better off if it had adopted Java as its
language of choice instead of Objective-C.

~~~
wmil
C++ made certain decisions about syntax, Java kept many of them. They have
been dominant languages for many years.

Objective-C made different decisions. They aren't clearly better or worse,
just different. So C++/Java developers have to learn to read a new syntax and
have to give up all of their favorite tools.

After all that work, they end using something that's basically the same as
their old language. So they aren't thrilled about the change.

~~~
vincetogo
You're right, the syntax is the main thing I've heard complaints about. I find
that really bizarre though. I've been working in C++ longer than Objective-C,
and more than Objective-C, but I don't find anything offensive about the
latter's syntax. So it's different. For me the measure of a language is how
hard or easy it is to get stuff done. Objective-C holds up pretty well in that
regard.

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krisdol
The only point I can identify with here is the implied one about avoiding
swift due to its license. Why anyone would prefer a proprietary-licensed
programming language is unfathomable.

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alexweej
His points are not invalid, but when you're stuck using C++98 day to day
because the technical board don't have nearly as much clout as a sole owner
such as Apple, the grass seems so much greener on that side to me. Bringing
ADTs and such to a practical language is definitely something to praise; it
will take C++ so many more years to get there, if it even happens at all.

