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Title
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Edward de Jong / Beads Project
05/03/2020, 12:01 AMto my knowledge the original designer for Swift left Apple, and they are now pursuing a kitchen sink approach to the language, with each version adding more crap. Swift used to be a pretty modest language, but is turning into a monster. Apple is pursuing a strategy of constant enhancement to the language perhaps so as to indirectly block Swift from stabilizing and becoming an Android platform language. Not that there was much danger, because a great deal of the language is dictated by the Cocoa underpinnings of OSX API sets. At least it has a very tight spec; the old ObjectiveC language that Jobs used at NextStep lacked a manual, and the spec was "whatever the compiler does". I wonder what the author of Swift will come up with next; not being tethered to OSX would give you a lot of freedom.
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Ivan Reese
05/03/2020, 3:32 AMI wonder what the author of Swift will come up with nextThere was a fun interview with Lattner on the Accidental Tech Podcast a few weeks ago about just that: https://atp.fm/episodes/371 The short version — working at Google (previously) and the RISC-V company SiFive (now), creating a new superset of LLVM IR called MLIR, which (he claims) will allow for Swift to be used with TensorFlow (et al.) to great effect.
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Steve Dekorte
05/03/2020, 5:25 AMDoes this not count as a manual? http://www.gnustep.org/resources/documentation/ObjectivCBook.pdf
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Stefan
05/03/2020, 10:41 AMSwift comes with that strong Apple flavor that puts some people off without even looking at it. However, if you’re interested in the future of programming and you’re ignoring Swift, you’re definitely missing out on some cutting edge language design developments.
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yoz
05/03/2020, 9:16 PMIt’s worth skimming the Google team’s doc explaining why they picked Swift ( https://github.com/tensorflow/swift/blob/master/docs/WhySwiftForTensorFlow.md ). It’s not that Swift has any special features, more that it has the right mix of strictness, usability and popularity.
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Zubairq
05/06/2020, 4:59 AMI think to be fair to Chis Lattner, he did say quite early on that he wanted Swift to be "everywhere", so Swift may be bad, but at least it is holding true to it's promise of "trying" to be everywhere. The same could be said about alot of other languages which are ubiquitous and have accumulated alot of junk over the years. I guess languages are like all software products. Everyone uses only 20% of the features, but it is always a different 20% than everyone else, so the software "appears" to gain bloat
Also interesting is that Chris Grangers light table inspired Swift as well
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Ivan Reese
05/23/2020, 12:28 PMInteresting! Source / context?
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Zubairq
05/23/2020, 3:13 PM