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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."
That sentence is actually valid in Brainfuck language.
839*929
Really. That last sentence proves it. They have no fucking idea what different languages are good for, or not.
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"?
From wikipedia
Go's "gc" compiler targets the Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Plan 9, and Microsoft Windows operating systems and the i386, amd64, ARM and IBM POWER processor architectures/ A second compiler, gccgo, is a GCC frontend.
So there are two major compilers for Go already, one of which is gcc based which targets just about every platform under the sun. I'm not saying go will run everywhere gcc will compile code because the runtime also needs porting, but it is very cross platform.
I developed one of my command line apps in Go http://rclone.org/ and I release binaries for it which run on Windows, OS X, Linux, *BSD and even Plan 9 all cross compiled from my Linux workstation.
Every man for himself, all in favour say "I"
This is a bad article; and the submitter, editor, and readers should all feel bad.
The reason why companies develop new languages is because the ones coming from academia are focused on the wrong things. Product development requires an industrial strength, strongly typed (for the most part) fast language.
Projects coming from academia are interpreted, JVM based, functional, obsessed with (im)mutability, closures, and lambda functions.
This is not to say those things are not nice, however they are not central to a programming language as used in large scale industrial systems.
Add to that, Go and Swift are pretty small languages. Learning either is something that a moderately competent programmer ought to be able to do in a few weeks. Neither is sufficiently different to other languages that there's a big cognitive jump. The difficult thing is always learning new libraries and frameworks, not learning a new language (well, unless the new language is C++, where after a decade of daily use developers are still not surprised to come across a language feature that they've never seen before).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
Exactly, this doesn't make sense at all for recruiting, it's actually backwards: using your own programming language makes it far more difficult to recruit, because very few people from outside your organization will have any expertise in the language.
Anyone who is proficient in Swift has hundreds or thousands of companies outside of Apple looking to hire them. Apple has to compete with every iOS software development shop in the world for those people.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
But they don't have a shortage of applicants. They actually want to narrow the field. If that were not the case, Google wouldn't have had (perhaps they still do) such a notoriously difficult interview process.
Economies of scale are critical here. Only a handful of companies are that big, and that desirable as places to work. So for these behemoths the usual logic is inverted. For them, narrowing the field really does "help recruitment"--the semantics of that phrase are inverted when dealing with relativistic money.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
OTOH, it's easier to retain employees who only know "your" language.
Masculine pronouns can be used in the gender neutral sense in English. Feminine pronouns cannot. Posting as AC because I don't want saying obvious fucking truths archived on my slashdot account, thanks to the witch hunts political shitfucks will inevitably engage in.
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.
Economies of scale are critical here. Only a handful of companies are that big, and that desirable as places to work. So for these behemoths the usual logic is inverted. For them, narrowing the field really does "help recruitment"--the semantics of that phrase are inverted when dealing with relativistic money.
A filter is only useful though if it removes the bad applicants and leaves the good applicants. Filtering by language (/framework) although common is also a very good way to exclude a significant amount of programming talent on the basis that you don't want to give them a few weeks to get productive in your pet language/framework. I've never interviewed (or applied) at either but both Google and Apple seem to have more farsighted hiring practices than that.
...and it had nothing at all to do with recruitment.
When Apple came up with the LLVM static analyzer, they became much more aware of just what kind of coding mistakes were costing them the most time and money, and Swift addresses those issues.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Yes, it's very unfair to men that they don't have their own pronouns.