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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?
No, and that's what Apple wants.
Most developers will pick Apple over Android. Then you have to rewrite the code for Android. Apple will get first release on a lot of apps, just what they prefer.
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.
That language is new. It's called Kotlin, and it is from JetBrains, the makers of the highly popular IntelliJ series of IDEs (+ WebStorm, PHPStorm, RubyMine, PyCharm etc).
Kotlin targets the JVM and JavaScript. It interops perfectly with Java. That means code written in it runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. Additionally, via the RoboVM project, JVM bytecode can be compiled to native ARM iOS/OSX binaries. There is no JIT compiler. RoboVM provides bindings to all Objective-C APIs on iOS so you can build native UIs and access all the same functionality as a native app. Programs written this way are on the app store, so Apple is cool with the technique.
Kotlin has a clean, concise syntax and many modern features that match those in Swift. For example it has nullability/optionality integrated with the type system. It has Markdown comments. It has extension functions. It has some support for pattern matching. It has named parameters. It has the ability to define "data classes" that have easy immutability, content equality, hashcodes, serialization etc all in a single line of code. It has type inference and compile-time inlined lambdas, so you can do high performance functional programming with it. It has features to support complex DSLs. It has a full IDE with many built in refactorings, online static analysis, and via the JVM it has high quality CPU/memory profilers and debugging support.
In short, programming with Kotlin is much like programming with Swift, except you have better tools, an IDE at least as strong as Xcode and in my experience stronger, and you can write apps with it that are indistinguishable from native iOS and Android apps.
That would probably have prevented the annoying bug I ran into a few years ago where someone copied a 64-bit time_t to a 32-bit int, did some arithmetic, and then copied it back to a 64-bit time_t, requiring us to update firmware at all customer sites to fix it. If they had to explicitly convert, they'd almost certainly have realized they were doing something wrong.
That bug alone probably cost us more money than the time required for programmers to always explicitly convert types.
... and C is the only language more popular than Java...
Nitpicking here. I started with C nearly 3 decades ago, I switched to Java but I'd be able to pick up C again in a very short time. Large parts of large/huge systems I design in C structures as they provide a nice abstraction of the underlying hardware. No matter how much I like C, it's no longer number 1 when considering the number of programmers involved. It's "too technical" for application programmers. Considering that financial programmers push the numbers and that they are moving from COBOL to Java, I see Java as the COBOL of the future. The upshot is that Java is good enough to do almost anything and much more elegant than COBOL.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)