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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.
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.
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