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Swift: Apple's Biggest Achievement For Coders
GordonShure.com writes: Despite its publicity and hype being rather quiet by Apple standards, the Swift programming language has attracted praise since its release last year. Swift is one of the few Apple products that represent a departure from the hardware-led Steve Jobs approach to the business. If this year's survey of coders by Stack Overflow is anything to go by, it looks as if the language might have potential to really shake things up in a landscape which has been little changed since the 1990s. Might the days of Apple programmers relying upon objective C be numbered?
Most developers? I don't know who you have been talking to or what you have been reading (maybe you work at Apple?), but the Android market share is much greater than the Apple market share. Plus it doesn't take much for a Java dev to turn his/her skills to Android, and C is the only language more popular than Java. In reality I doubt either platform will have issue finding developers.
Obj-C is on the way out.
Uhh, no. So much of the system libraries on both OS X and iOS are written in Objective-C and they aren't going anywhere. Also, all the new APIs of iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 are still written in both C and Objective-C with Swift bridge headers. Basically, it's the opposite of what you claim.
I'd guess that we're about a year away from the point where the majority new code at Apple is written in Swift.
Maybe at the application level, but not for system libraries.
And VB was a hugely popular language for writing business apps and one of Microsoft's best selling products.
If this year's survey of coders by Stack Overflow is anything to go by, it looks as if the language might have potential to really shake things up in a landscape which has been little changed since the 1990s
"Most Loved"
"Most Wanted"
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Most developers? I don't know who you have been talking to or what you have been reading (maybe you work at Apple?), but the Android market share is much greater than the Apple market share. Plus it doesn't take much for a Java dev to turn his/her skills to Android, and C is the only language more popular than Java. In reality I doubt either platform will have issue finding developers.
He is talking about profit potential, not who's got his OS installed on the most devices. The implication is that iOS development is more profitable than Android development which is something that I have heard from more mobile developers than just him.
No, it's Apple specific. However that's OK because there's a language which is much like Swift, except it runs on pretty much every device you might have.
Well, pretty much any device accept the odd iPhone here and there?
Looks like they are trying to create a Swift clone. Excuse me, but I think I prefer the real thing. Which will quite soon run everywhere, unless Google throws its toys out of the pram. And which has the brains of LLVM behind it. And most importantly, which is in actual use. Maybe Swift will never be as good as Kotlin's claims, but Kotlin will never be as good as Swift.
Is Swift suitable for writing applications for all? If not, developers would be writing for a limited, albeit popular platform, but limited to a certain subset nonetheless.
Well, Apple just announced that they are planning to open-source Swift and will be also be releasing a Linux version of the compiler. So the language itself isn't going to be Apple-only for much longer.
However, that only solves the language problem - the big divide between platforms is the totally different APIs that developers have to learn. Frankly, that's usually a bigger learning curve than picking up a new language.
Mind you, you can say the same for most of the big languages - off the top of my head only Java (and maybe Javascript/HTML5) come with baked-in crossplatform APIs suitable for writing GUI applications.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
In the keynote they announced Swift being open source later this year, including releasing versions for Linux...
Having done over a decade of backend work in the past, I think it would make a pretty good server language also. It's all about the libraries and frameworks that support what you are trying to do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And Apple apps don't spy on you?
How can you prove they don't?
Well, for a start, you can deny them permissions when they try to do something you don't expect. When the Happy Kitty Screen Saver wants to access your camera and contacts on an Android tablet, you can't. You already had to accept 'let this app do random crap' when you installed it, or you wouldn't have been allowed to install it.
As far as I'm concerned, Android isn't much use for anything other than a mobile web browser until it gets proper per-app permission controls.
Looks like they are trying to create a Swift clone. Excuse me, but I think I prefer the real thing. Which will quite soon run everywhere, unless Google throws its toys out of the pram. And which has the brains of LLVM behind it. And most importantly, which is in actual use. Maybe Swift will never be as good as Kotlin's claims, but Kotlin will never be as good as Swift.
Kotlin has been released in 2011, so I don't think it tries to be a clone of Swift. It's more a "Java replacement", like Ceylon, Gosu or Fantom, which is not a bad idea when you have something like Oracle Corp which get to decide how to manage an open technology (Java...)