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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."
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"
Right. Apple created Swift because Objective-C was a nice language for the requirements of '90s computing, but is starting to be limited by its C heritage. They needed a more modern language that interoperates very well with Objective-C (because they have a lot of legacy Objective-C code that isn't going away any time soon) and this required making a new language because there weren't any good contenders available. MacRuby is the closest, but falls short in a number of areas.
Google didn't create Go as the result of some corporate masterplan, a small team at Google created it and managed to get buy-in from some other groups at Google. It's still far from the most widely used language for new projects inside Google, but it does have some advantages (though is slightly let down by Rob Pike's refusal to accept that some people who are not Rob Pike have had good ideas in the last 30 years).
The recruiting thing can't really work. It would only really make sense if people would learn a cool language and then discover that there are very few places where they can work and use it. This is sort-of true for something like Erlang or Smalltalk, but Swift is fairly widely used by people developing for iOS and OS X (and would probably not be worth Apple's effort in developing it if it weren't). If the language is successful enough that enough people are learning it to significantly affect the pool of potential applicants for a company the size of Apple or Google, then enough other companies are likely to be using it that it isn't a significant benefit.
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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
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."
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.
Yes, it's very unfair to men that they don't have their own pronouns.