This is an IDE feature, not a language feature. VS can do it for C++ as well, by the way. But there's nothing stopping someone from implementing it for Java.
From an architectural perspective, the differences may look small - an OOP language is an OOP language. But for those "coding in the trenches", they can easily add up to hours of saved time due to the ability to apply DRY more consistently, for example.
Granted, Java has caught up on the most important piece, which is lambdas. But their generics still suck (which spills over into lambdas, because they use nominal function types), they don't have sequence comprehensions, and they don't have any syntactic sugar for continuation-style async programming.
It's not a patent licensing scheme, it's a disclaimer, which basically says that MS won't sue you for patents pertaining to the CLR if you implement the CLI spec.
The brand, yes. The language, not so much. VB3 -> VB4 was a huge breaking transition in just as many respects as VB6 -> VB.NET, and that was in 1995. VB4 -> VB5 was also breaking in quite a few things, largely because of Win16->Win32 move; and that was in 1997. VB6, the last version, was in 1998.
So at most it was around for 3 years if you count VB4.
Most importantly, large chunks of.NET are now open source, including pretty much all of the web/server stack. It won't go away even if Microsoft were to drop it.
LINQ is just sequence comprehensions combined with a very primitive form of AST-based "macros" (quoted because they're actually runtime). The latter is occasionally useful though not a proper substitute for true macros; the former is a hallmark of any sane language designed in the past 20 years.
Russian farmers of the last two decades had a different kind of problem.. the imports of cheap, western food, often the result of western food subsidies. I have no doubt that if the Russian state allowed Russian farmers to keep what they have earned, and to sell their products at market prices, Russia could certainly feed itself.
As it happens, I do know some people directly involved in it, and it's not actually the main problems. The main problems are the lack of a qualified labor force. The collectivist mentality is still quite alive and well in the countryside, and so a farmer who does well has to deal with rampant theft and even vandalism of his property, often from the very same people he has hired.
The other problem is that a lot of agricultural techniques and machinery in use are not very modern. They're literally getting a yield several times less than a Western farmer would from the same area, and that's in the regions of the country that are most conductive to agriculture (chernozem).
And yes, market forces in an autarky would obviously stimulate local production... but it still doesn't appear out of thin air. It takes years and years of development and engineering effort, and the thing is, the rest of the world doesn't stand still while that's happening. Autarky inevitably translates to severe technological lag.
Internally, before the economy can catch up, there will inevitably be a significant slump, as well. Just how much of a slump depends on how much the existing economy depends on foreign trade, especially import - and for Russia this is quite significant. Whether the populace would actually be willing to tolerate that for long enough for economy to rebound is doubtful.
Unless, of course, such economic policies are also combined with sociopolitical totalitarianism, Soviet-style. That can last for longer - especially as it doesn't need to spend resources on "luxuries" such as civilian cell phones, and can instead just explain the populace that such things are wasteful and unnecessary.
I don't think you fully appreciate the difference between the USSR in 80s, and Russia today. USSR got to that point literally through decades of economic hardship, and even then it could offer a lifestyle at best close to American one from 20 years before that. Russia, on the other hand, had its economy pretty much ruined in the 90s, and only very slowly recovered since then - and said recovery involved making the country a part of the worldwide economy. A lot of the things that enabled relative autarky in the 80s simply don't exist, because when you have free trade with other countries, they don't make any economic sense whatsoever to maintain.
Heck, forget about consumer electronics; the country can't even manufacture its own CPU for military tech (they can design it, but it's still fabricated in China) - and this is something that has been an ongoing, priority project for the Russian military for several years now.
The other aspect of it is that it's not just the convenience / luxury things, but the very basics, like food. Russian agriculture is in the shitter compared even to Soviet times, and to remind, they had to buy grain from Canada even back then to feed themselves. With all trade shut down, I find it very doubtful that Russia could actually feed itself well.
One could argue that without a fully protected freedom of speech, there's no real political freedom, either - i.e. maybe there are elections, but what good are they if people who believe they're wronged can't publicly state their grievances and call for legitimate remedial action via voting?
That's the problem with any kind of censorship... the ultimate threat is that being against it becomes censored as well, and then you don't know if it's really a democratic decision or not.
There are all kinds of interesting (or "interesting", depending on your perspective) people here if you care to look. For example, I once had a rather enlightening discussion with a guy who was a self-professed fundie worldwide caliphate Islamist (several years before ISIS, even!), about when and in what circumstances it is appropriate to cut off people's heads according to the Sharia.
You should listen to more than one source. You might have then found out that Chechens and Dagestanis are among those fighting on the separatist side, too.
And yes, there are Chechens fighting on the Ukrainian side. Those are mostly Chechen nationalists from the 90s. They're Muslims (just as pro-separatist Chechens are), but they are not Islamists.
And then you have stuff like this, which is pure trolling (this particular picture is of separatists, but it happens on both sides).
I don't see what's questionable about NATO involvement, so long as the legitimate government of the country has asked for that involvement - which it did. Last I checked, that's what sovereignty means, among other things.
You're talking about 18-20 year olds, many of whom are conscripts, and for whom the main attraction of going along with this is to show off just how badass they are. It's hard to get more anti-COMSEC than that short of intentional sabotage.
Re:Say Good By to the Rainforests ....
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Do not believe in the existence of something without significant evidence for its existence. I don't know what the proper label is for someone whose belief system is such.
It's called "skepticism". Where you need to distinguish it from the more mundane meaning of the word, "philosophical skepticism".
Why fixate on the particular sub-domain. Why fixate on the conflict specifically with those who are religious?
Because religion still plays an incredibly important role in politics and society, and many of us believe that it is a harmful role, and therefore worth addressing specifically?
Note that "religion is harmful" is also orthogonal to lack of belief in gods - it is entirely possible to believe in the existence of a god, but also believe that his worship is harmful; or be an atheist, but believe that religion is beneficial (e.g. Charles Maurras, or many in the neo-reactionary movement). In practice, these days, it intersects for obvious reasons, but again, this is a matter of practicality, not ideology.
Re:Say Good By to the Rainforests ....
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Defending the idea that there are no gods means you believe it.
Like I said, atheism is not an idea that there are no gods. Atheism is the idea that it's silly to believe that there are gods when there's no evidence indicating that this is the case. It doesn't refute the notion that gods exist categorically (doing so would be a statement of faith); it just refuses to deal with an unproven concept by taking it on faith.
There is no scientific proof on either side. In fact, from the very definition of gods, it is kind of hard to prove they don't exist.
It depends on the gods in question. But yes, for something like a monotheistic god of Christianity or Islam, it is in fact outright impossible to prove that they don't exist - because they, being omnipotent, can create conditions for any possible observation to happen, and so there's no way to disprove their existence through empirical methods, which is the cornerstone of "scientific".
In practice, though, if something cannot be so proven, it's easier to assume that it doesn't exist (less concepts to worry about), as a practical matter. You can't prove the non-existence of the Invisible Pink Unicorn, either, but you don't go around thinking, "hmm, I wonder if She exists, maybe I should behave accordingly just in case". You just assume that She doesn't for the sake of simplicity. Note that it is not really a belief because it is not categorical - it's just a convenience shortcut.
If you accept that we just don't know (why would we have to pick a side?), then you are agnostic, not atheist.
A common confusion. Agnosticism is not "we just don't know". It's a belief that it is, in general, impossible to know. It is orthogonal to atheism or theism (you may accept that it's impossible to know but still believe in God, or ignore the concept).
Re:Say Good By to the Rainforests ....
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Do atheists have any beliefs, do those beliefs affect their world view or culture? Sounds like a religion to me. You don't need to believe in a deity in order to have a religion. Believing only in science is a religion.
Not every belief is a religion. For example, a person can believe that people are inherently altruistic - this is not a religion.
On matters that are concerned with religion, however, an atheist does not have any beliefs.
Re:Say Good By to the Rainforests ....
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Atheism is not a belief that there's no gods. It's a lack of belief that there are gods. There is a difference, though religious people might find it hard to comprehend.
Re:And so the cycle of "reform" continues
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So why did we really get worked up about mandatory minimums and "three strikes" and petty drug crimes all of a sudden in the early 80's? I can't say for sure, but one has to wonder if its really a coincidence that the effect of these laws was to take a tremendous amount of young black men off the streets and leave the rest in mortal fear of the cops only a decade after the legalized oppression of Jim Crow got outlawed nationwide.
No coincidence, though it's not just about blacks, and not just early 80s - before that (think Nixon) it was about all those dirty hippie anti-war protesters, for example.
But it's not like it's secret, either. Atwater on the "southern strategy" in 1981:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968, you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger.""
The requirements are that it is able to call the Cocoa API
Those are the requirements that only matter for people who code against the Cocoa API (i.e. those who develop for Apple platforms). This thread is about cross-platform use of Swift, i.e. on Linux and/or Windows, where this is not any kind of inherent advantage for the lack of Cocoa (and even if it were there, it would have to compete against the corresponding standard libraries of other language/framework combos).
and that it is fast enough for systems programming - the latter being largely done by being designed from scratch to be highly optimisable
There's nothing specific about Swift that makes it "highly optimizable", unless you compare it to Obj-C (which, again, is not the subject of this thread). An AOT C# compiler, like.NET Native or Xamarin, can optimize just as well, with the only real difference being GC vs refcounting (which can go either way depending on your allocation patterns).
And there's little resemblance to Java, beyond the certain commonality that all modern language syntax has.
Not all modern language syntax. All modern C-like language syntax. And if you're making this argument, then it applies equally to C#. I'll grant you that C# is slightly closer to Java, because it started its life as basically a Java clone with Delphi-like keywords, but that was 15 years ago. Things have changed a lot since then. Today, idiomatic C# is replete with lambdas and sequence comprehensions, for example, something that is very rarely seen in Java even though they finally have that feature now.
The whole apple-didn't-need-to-write-a-new-language argument is just ill-informed.
I'm not making that point. Indeed, I have always said that Apple is in a desperate need of a new, modern language to replace the horribly aged Obj-C - for its ecosystem. The question is, what, if anything, Swift has to offer outside of that ecosystem, that is not already offered by something else that is just as, or more, popular.
And the answer to that question is: a few minor features, but nothing particularly interesting or groundbreaking. Which shouldn't be a surprise, because Swift is clearly an amalgamation of successful features that have been seen in other popular OOP languages with C-style syntax in the past decade or so. There's nothing wrong with it: it's a perfectly rational and pragmatic approach to the problem, and I commend Apple for going that route instead of reinventing the wheel. It makes it that much easier to master the language, coming from another mainstream platform.
But please don't make the impression that there's some considerable innovation going on here. Obj-C developers are easily impressed, but the rest of us have seen all this stuff before.
C# may be a "Java like language", but so is Swift (and virtually any other modern language that happens to use C'ish syntax and is statically typed). Given the specific list of language features that you gave earlier, C# has most of those, in many cases with quite similar syntax to boot. You could bring up the fact that it's a VM language, to which my answer would be.NET Native. In terms of low-level constructs, C# also has e.g. raw pointers, unions and stack allocated memory.
So the only major difference that I can see is the memory model - tracing GC vs reference counting. Everything else is relatively minor.
So far as I can see, it's not quite the same - it basically lets you define arbitrary implicit conversions, but it doesn't make the literal itself a regex (so you can't call methods directly on it, say).
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This is an IDE feature, not a language feature. VS can do it for C++ as well, by the way. But there's nothing stopping someone from implementing it for Java.
From an architectural perspective, the differences may look small - an OOP language is an OOP language. But for those "coding in the trenches", they can easily add up to hours of saved time due to the ability to apply DRY more consistently, for example.
Granted, Java has caught up on the most important piece, which is lambdas. But their generics still suck (which spills over into lambdas, because they use nominal function types), they don't have sequence comprehensions, and they don't have any syntactic sugar for continuation-style async programming.
It's not a patent licensing scheme, it's a disclaimer, which basically says that MS won't sue you for patents pertaining to the CLR if you implement the CLI spec.
The brand, yes. The language, not so much. VB3 -> VB4 was a huge breaking transition in just as many respects as VB6 -> VB.NET, and that was in 1995. VB4 -> VB5 was also breaking in quite a few things, largely because of Win16->Win32 move; and that was in 1997. VB6, the last version, was in 1998.
So at most it was around for 3 years if you count VB4.
Most importantly, large chunks of .NET are now open source, including pretty much all of the web/server stack. It won't go away even if Microsoft were to drop it.
And which of those that you've listed were open source, under a license that enables anyone to fork and continue developing them if they so wish?
LINQ is just sequence comprehensions combined with a very primitive form of AST-based "macros" (quoted because they're actually runtime). The latter is occasionally useful though not a proper substitute for true macros; the former is a hallmark of any sane language designed in the past 20 years.
Russian farmers of the last two decades had a different kind of problem.. the imports of cheap, western food, often the result of western food subsidies. I have no doubt that if the Russian state allowed Russian farmers to keep what they have earned, and to sell their products at market prices, Russia could certainly feed itself.
As it happens, I do know some people directly involved in it, and it's not actually the main problems. The main problems are the lack of a qualified labor force. The collectivist mentality is still quite alive and well in the countryside, and so a farmer who does well has to deal with rampant theft and even vandalism of his property, often from the very same people he has hired.
The other problem is that a lot of agricultural techniques and machinery in use are not very modern. They're literally getting a yield several times less than a Western farmer would from the same area, and that's in the regions of the country that are most conductive to agriculture (chernozem).
And yes, market forces in an autarky would obviously stimulate local production... but it still doesn't appear out of thin air. It takes years and years of development and engineering effort, and the thing is, the rest of the world doesn't stand still while that's happening. Autarky inevitably translates to severe technological lag.
Internally, before the economy can catch up, there will inevitably be a significant slump, as well. Just how much of a slump depends on how much the existing economy depends on foreign trade, especially import - and for Russia this is quite significant. Whether the populace would actually be willing to tolerate that for long enough for economy to rebound is doubtful.
Unless, of course, such economic policies are also combined with sociopolitical totalitarianism, Soviet-style. That can last for longer - especially as it doesn't need to spend resources on "luxuries" such as civilian cell phones, and can instead just explain the populace that such things are wasteful and unnecessary.
I don't think you fully appreciate the difference between the USSR in 80s, and Russia today. USSR got to that point literally through decades of economic hardship, and even then it could offer a lifestyle at best close to American one from 20 years before that. Russia, on the other hand, had its economy pretty much ruined in the 90s, and only very slowly recovered since then - and said recovery involved making the country a part of the worldwide economy. A lot of the things that enabled relative autarky in the 80s simply don't exist, because when you have free trade with other countries, they don't make any economic sense whatsoever to maintain.
Heck, forget about consumer electronics; the country can't even manufacture its own CPU for military tech (they can design it, but it's still fabricated in China) - and this is something that has been an ongoing, priority project for the Russian military for several years now.
The other aspect of it is that it's not just the convenience / luxury things, but the very basics, like food. Russian agriculture is in the shitter compared even to Soviet times, and to remind, they had to buy grain from Canada even back then to feed themselves. With all trade shut down, I find it very doubtful that Russia could actually feed itself well.
One could argue that without a fully protected freedom of speech, there's no real political freedom, either - i.e. maybe there are elections, but what good are they if people who believe they're wronged can't publicly state their grievances and call for legitimate remedial action via voting?
That's the problem with any kind of censorship... the ultimate threat is that being against it becomes censored as well, and then you don't know if it's really a democratic decision or not.
There are all kinds of interesting (or "interesting", depending on your perspective) people here if you care to look. For example, I once had a rather enlightening discussion with a guy who was a self-professed fundie worldwide caliphate Islamist (several years before ISIS, even!), about when and in what circumstances it is appropriate to cut off people's heads according to the Sharia.
You have to try the Bay of Pigs first before the embargo, though. And a couple of failed assassination attempts on the head of state.
You should listen to more than one source. You might have then found out that Chechens and Dagestanis are among those fighting on the separatist side, too.
And yes, there are Chechens fighting on the Ukrainian side. Those are mostly Chechen nationalists from the 90s. They're Muslims (just as pro-separatist Chechens are), but they are not Islamists.
And then you have stuff like this, which is pure trolling (this particular picture is of separatists, but it happens on both sides).
I don't see what's questionable about NATO involvement, so long as the legitimate government of the country has asked for that involvement - which it did. Last I checked, that's what sovereignty means, among other things.
Not to forget, they were fighting for a just cause, and you were not. Morale matters.
So basically you want to carry out a bunch of your own personal vendettas. Why do you think the board or the shareholders should be interested?
You're talking about 18-20 year olds, many of whom are conscripts, and for whom the main attraction of going along with this is to show off just how badass they are. It's hard to get more anti-COMSEC than that short of intentional sabotage.
Do not believe in the existence of something without significant evidence for its existence. I don't know what the proper label is for someone whose belief system is such.
It's called "skepticism". Where you need to distinguish it from the more mundane meaning of the word, "philosophical skepticism".
Why fixate on the particular sub-domain. Why fixate on the conflict specifically with those who are religious?
Because religion still plays an incredibly important role in politics and society, and many of us believe that it is a harmful role, and therefore worth addressing specifically?
Note that "religion is harmful" is also orthogonal to lack of belief in gods - it is entirely possible to believe in the existence of a god, but also believe that his worship is harmful; or be an atheist, but believe that religion is beneficial (e.g. Charles Maurras, or many in the neo-reactionary movement). In practice, these days, it intersects for obvious reasons, but again, this is a matter of practicality, not ideology.
Defending the idea that there are no gods means you believe it.
Like I said, atheism is not an idea that there are no gods. Atheism is the idea that it's silly to believe that there are gods when there's no evidence indicating that this is the case. It doesn't refute the notion that gods exist categorically (doing so would be a statement of faith); it just refuses to deal with an unproven concept by taking it on faith.
There is no scientific proof on either side. In fact, from the very definition of gods, it is kind of hard to prove they don't exist.
It depends on the gods in question. But yes, for something like a monotheistic god of Christianity or Islam, it is in fact outright impossible to prove that they don't exist - because they, being omnipotent, can create conditions for any possible observation to happen, and so there's no way to disprove their existence through empirical methods, which is the cornerstone of "scientific".
In practice, though, if something cannot be so proven, it's easier to assume that it doesn't exist (less concepts to worry about), as a practical matter. You can't prove the non-existence of the Invisible Pink Unicorn, either, but you don't go around thinking, "hmm, I wonder if She exists, maybe I should behave accordingly just in case". You just assume that She doesn't for the sake of simplicity. Note that it is not really a belief because it is not categorical - it's just a convenience shortcut.
If you accept that we just don't know (why would we have to pick a side?), then you are agnostic, not atheist.
A common confusion. Agnosticism is not "we just don't know". It's a belief that it is, in general, impossible to know. It is orthogonal to atheism or theism (you may accept that it's impossible to know but still believe in God, or ignore the concept).
Do atheists have any beliefs, do those beliefs affect their world view or culture? Sounds like a religion to me. You don't need to believe in a deity in order to have a religion. Believing only in science is a religion.
Not every belief is a religion. For example, a person can believe that people are inherently altruistic - this is not a religion.
On matters that are concerned with religion, however, an atheist does not have any beliefs.
Atheism is not a belief that there's no gods. It's a lack of belief that there are gods. There is a difference, though religious people might find it hard to comprehend.
So why did we really get worked up about mandatory minimums and "three strikes" and petty drug crimes all of a sudden in the early 80's? I can't say for sure, but one has to wonder if its really a coincidence that the effect of these laws was to take a tremendous amount of young black men off the streets and leave the rest in mortal fear of the cops only a decade after the legalized oppression of Jim Crow got outlawed nationwide.
No coincidence, though it's not just about blacks, and not just early 80s - before that (think Nixon) it was about all those dirty hippie anti-war protesters, for example.
But it's not like it's secret, either. Atwater on the "southern strategy" in 1981:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968, you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger.""
Ah - now that is a very worthwhile feature that I'd kill to have in C#.
Is this C-only, or can it also handle C++?
The requirements are that it is able to call the Cocoa API
Those are the requirements that only matter for people who code against the Cocoa API (i.e. those who develop for Apple platforms). This thread is about cross-platform use of Swift, i.e. on Linux and/or Windows, where this is not any kind of inherent advantage for the lack of Cocoa (and even if it were there, it would have to compete against the corresponding standard libraries of other language/framework combos).
and that it is fast enough for systems programming - the latter being largely done by being designed from scratch to be highly optimisable
There's nothing specific about Swift that makes it "highly optimizable", unless you compare it to Obj-C (which, again, is not the subject of this thread). An AOT C# compiler, like .NET Native or Xamarin, can optimize just as well, with the only real difference being GC vs refcounting (which can go either way depending on your allocation patterns).
And there's little resemblance to Java, beyond the certain commonality that all modern language syntax has.
Not all modern language syntax. All modern C-like language syntax. And if you're making this argument, then it applies equally to C#. I'll grant you that C# is slightly closer to Java, because it started its life as basically a Java clone with Delphi-like keywords, but that was 15 years ago. Things have changed a lot since then. Today, idiomatic C# is replete with lambdas and sequence comprehensions, for example, something that is very rarely seen in Java even though they finally have that feature now.
The whole apple-didn't-need-to-write-a-new-language argument is just ill-informed.
I'm not making that point. Indeed, I have always said that Apple is in a desperate need of a new, modern language to replace the horribly aged Obj-C - for its ecosystem. The question is, what, if anything, Swift has to offer outside of that ecosystem, that is not already offered by something else that is just as, or more, popular.
And the answer to that question is: a few minor features, but nothing particularly interesting or groundbreaking. Which shouldn't be a surprise, because Swift is clearly an amalgamation of successful features that have been seen in other popular OOP languages with C-style syntax in the past decade or so. There's nothing wrong with it: it's a perfectly rational and pragmatic approach to the problem, and I commend Apple for going that route instead of reinventing the wheel. It makes it that much easier to master the language, coming from another mainstream platform.
But please don't make the impression that there's some considerable innovation going on here. Obj-C developers are easily impressed, but the rest of us have seen all this stuff before.
C# may be a "Java like language", but so is Swift (and virtually any other modern language that happens to use C'ish syntax and is statically typed). Given the specific list of language features that you gave earlier, C# has most of those, in many cases with quite similar syntax to boot. You could bring up the fact that it's a VM language, to which my answer would be .NET Native. In terms of low-level constructs, C# also has e.g. raw pointers, unions and stack allocated memory.
So the only major difference that I can see is the memory model - tracing GC vs reference counting. Everything else is relatively minor.
So far as I can see, it's not quite the same - it basically lets you define arbitrary implicit conversions, but it doesn't make the literal itself a regex (so you can't call methods directly on it, say).