

Swift: Scripting Language for Many-Task Computing - turnersr
http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/swift/main/

======
zmmmmm
Reminds me a bit of Bpipe (<http://bpipe.org>), and Ruffus
(<http://code.google.com/p/ruffus/>) ... though perhaps more mature? But the
syntax is a bit more obtuse when you actually look at the examples (not that I
mind learning it if the payoff is sufficient).

I think we'll see a lot of DSL style / scripting languages like this pop up as
big data computing becomes more mainstream and people try to make parallelism
easier to grok.

------
erikb
It's funny that most people (me, too) don't like the syntax. I think the
problem is that Swift sells itself as a scripting language and scripting
languages are often very easy to read like Bash, Ruby or Python.

Well, maybe if I see it again in the future, I'll try to code something in it.

------
damiongrimfield
does this qualify as a name collision with the php email library swift mailer?

<http://swiftmailer.org/>

~~~
gtani
Kind of like there's Sphinx fulltext indexing and Sphinx doc generation lib
for python and CMU's sphinx speech recognition/generation framework, you have
to specify which but google seems ok with them.

------
gringomorcego
I started seizing a bit when I looked at the example code.

I'm sure it's awesome, but friggin come on. There's more to life than algol
2.0.

~~~
reitzensteinm
Could anyone who's got knowledge of the environment explain why a new language
was required - what couldn't have been done as a library for an existing
language?

~~~
turnersr
If you're interested in a Python implementation of some of the core ideas of
Swift (task-based parallelism, DAG representation of work-flow, etc..) look
here: <https://github.com/timarmstrong/pydflow>

A discussion of the Swift language can be found here:
[http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/swift/papers/SwiftLanguageForDist...](http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/swift/papers/SwiftLanguageForDistributedParallelScripting.pdf)

