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Why Apple, Google, and FB Have Their Own Programming Languages
An anonymous reader writes: Scott Rosenberg, author of Dreaming in Code dissects Apple's Swift, Google's Go, and other new languages — why they were created, what makes them different, and what they bring (or not) to programmers. "In very specific ways, both Go and Swift exemplify and embody the essences of the companies that built them: the server farm vs. the personal device; the open Web vs. the App Store; a cross-platform world vs. a company town. Of all the divides that distinguish programming languages—compiled or interpreted? static vs. dynamic variable typing? memory-managed/garbage-collected or not?—these might be the ones that matter most today."
I don't think it's really that. I think it's more the divide specified.
Some of us do NOT like using ebooks for reference manuals. We like having dog-eared tomes with tons of bookmarks or post-it tabs. The ability to flip back and forth between multiple pages in an ad-hoc manner is also useful.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Swift needed to be created because Objective C stinks, and no other modern language would have fit smoothly into the Smalltalkish legacy of the Cocoa framework. I'm just glad that the Apple fanboys who constitute most of my fellow iOS developers are finally allowed to believe bad things about Objective C, at least now that there's a nice alternative. Made me a little sick before to hear people praising Obj-C while writing reams of ridiculously verbose code that nobody will want to maintain 5 years from now.
Objective-C is fine. The square brackets syntax just become second nature and disappear into the background after a couple of days. And personally I have no objection to methods with long names - it helps me understand what has been written when I return to a program after months (or a year) away. The long names actually make the code more readable and maintainable. I like Objective-C and have no bad things to say about it or the concepts behind it.
What Swift does bring is enhancements that I would like to see in Objective-C - for instance return values with tuples. There are other enhancements as well. However, Swift is too new to really say if it will be successful.
If I was in charge of a huge budget, and the ability to foist my language on the public, I would invent my own language. heck, every programmer wishes they could design the language everyone uses.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Some of these are actually good names, e.g. Swift
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