Pivotal Perspectives Newsletter- September 2104

Mon Aug 25 18:30:55 UTC 2014

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** Pivotal Perspectives on- Swift
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**
Developer Michael Demetriou wanted to hear other developer's perspectives on Swift, the new programming language from Apple.    Michael wanted to know  "Do we need yet another programming language?"
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The answer?   Most of you said no!

Comments:

Yes:

I think apple is on the right path. A new, improved, more "modern" programming language was much needed.

For me Swift is the reason to start iOS development

Swift is what modern C++14 could be with the ugly bits cut off and the dangerous C backwards-compatibility removed.

I think apple is on the right path. A new, improved, more "modern" programming language was much needed.

No:

The part of not having to add brackets around conditions within if, while, for and switch controls makes me feel uncomfortable to program in.

Typical Apple hype, you can't trust their statements about performance

While it's great that Apple realizes people aren't happy with the oddball specialty language Objective C, creating yet another oddball specialty language is not the right answer.

How does
Swift compare to Objective C?

A lot more dynamic and just the change we need to continue the world of iOS development

More ideas taken from modern scripting and functional languages compared to objective c which didn't advance much further than c/c++

This programming language like Objective C, but easier. This programming language like scripting language.

Way better than objc. The syntax is great and modern. it combines almost all the best things from other existing languages.

It is less consistent and semantically buggy.

Just based to the free ebook. It is more like Ruby than OBJC. Yes its notation is pretty short, but there is nothing wrong with readable OBJC notation.

Quite different. Muti-paradigm (generics, OOP, functional). Compiler-time checking, type inference, tuples... A modern language at last! I love ObjC but also wanted to learn a new language

Better, very different but still inspired by objective c. A lot of rules to keep things clean, sometimes seem arbitrary. Very feature rich but completely different feel. Still learning

Better readability. Code is much easier to understand

It is big difference is its dynamic way of not taking care of the memory.

Swift is dramatically safer both from offering type-safety and better functional programming. It has the potential to be a much faster language.

It is simpler. It reduces the amount of files. But also makes you lazy with parentheses and semicolons which is problematic when switching to another language (platform).

Terse. Optional types are a big plus. Some changes seem to reduce the number of keystrokes at the risk of introducing confusion, i.e. break; now implied in switch statements. The big risk is that Apple can't deliver. Already in the Xcode beta process we have seen Swift changed, Introducing this at WWDC was probably premature and should have been kept until the language spec was nailed down. I know lots of developers who are interested in Swift but who would laugh at the idea of doing real work in it. And nobody I know thinks Apple can make it a serious mainstream language in under six months.

Here is Chris Gibbs from Apple talking about the value of role of Swift. (click on the image to play the youtube video clip)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv2zJErQt84

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