Slashdot Mirror


Why Apple and Google Made Their Own Programming Languages

Gamoid writes: This Business Insider article looks into the state of Google Go and Apple Swift, highlighting what the two languages have in common — and why tech companies would bother involving themselves in the programming language holy wars. From the article: "One fringe benefit for Google and Apple is that making your own programming language makes recruitment easier — for instance, since it builds a lot of its own server applications in Go, Google is more likely to hire a developer who's already proficient in the language since she would need less training."

3 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Huh? by istartedi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It weeds out the people who aren't fan-boy enough to become proficient in your proprietary language before you even interview them. TFA cites a lot of other reasons they wrote these languages. This one got crab-apple picked for some reason.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  2. better language? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    is it really impossible for anyone to believe that a language and toolchain can actually
    make an organization more productive?

    it seems like everyone is so lost in technical marketing that they've forgotten
    about actually programming computers

  3. Re: Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Plenty. All of your criteria have little to do with the language and much more to do with the developer. Any properly defined/debugged program is "safe". Any properly optimized program is "performant". "Clear" is just about source code, which means that it's entirely up to the developer.

    ISO 9899:2011.
    ISO 14882:2014E.
    ECMA 334.

    Swift is a "lookalike" to all of these in several ways, especially as that list goes on. The list of languages that aren't ancestral to Swift but that have standards could go on for quite a while longer.