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Swift: Apple's Biggest Achievement For Coders

Posted by timothy on from the pretty-fast dept.

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?

9 of 337 comments (clear)

  1. One more in a crowded field by TWX · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How's Swift's cross-platform suitability?

    There are two Apple platforms, one popular Google platform, one less-popular Google platform, plus Microsoft's platform. 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.

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    1. Re: One more in a crowded field by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

      the Android market share is much greater than the Apple market share.

      For phones, yes. For apps, no. The average iOS user buys far more apps than the average Android user.

    2. Re: One more in a crowded field by unami · · Score: 4, Insightful

      whatever the reason may be, this still makes apple's platform more interesting for professional developers.

    3. Re:One more in a crowded field by Chalnoth · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Just as with Objective-C, I doubt that hardly anybody else will make use of the language.

      The problem is it just doesn't have all that much to offer for projects that are already making use of other languages. It's got a few slick features, but it can't really stand out all that much and the library support is going to be very far behind more mature languages for a long time (if not forever).

    4. Re: One more in a crowded field by laird · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Most business models for apps are based on people using the apps. While Android leads in terms of unit sales, iOS leads (by a surprisingly large margin) in terms of app installs and usage. There are a lot of Android phones that are basically used as "feature phones" with the ability to browse the web and run apps ignored.

      So if what you care about is people installing and using your app, the numbers drive you to iOS.

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    5. Re: One more in a crowded field by master_kaos · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And I have the exact opposite experience. We have 8x the usage on iOS vs android, and android users complain a lot more (some legit, some just outrageous requests)

    6. Re: One more in a crowded field by the_B0fh · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's why the top 10 flashlight apps in the Android App Store all need access to networking, your SMS, mailbox, contacts, etc. "creative ideas for monetization" indeed.

  2. This survey is championed everywhere... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    I keep seeing this survey and there's so much weird shit in it, I gotta think something is very wrong with the results.

  3. Okay, poll... by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How much did Apple pay for this article?