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8 comments

1 Charles Johnson  Jun 3, 2014 4:40:26pm

I’m definitely going to check out Swift.

2 William Barnett-Lewis  Jun 3, 2014 4:43:39pm

We’ll see. Apple’s track record on this kind of thing is hardly inspiring.

Look up a delightful but essentially dead programming language called Dylan for example. It was to be the same thing as this but for the Newton.

3 dog philosopher  Jun 3, 2014 5:13:42pm

dunno why they don’t just use java

4 William Barnett-Lewis  Jun 3, 2014 6:49:13pm

Oh for goodness’ sake… just another layer on top of Java… from the downloads page at swift-lang.org (pointed to from Apple)

For the majority of users, this is the version you will want to download. This package contains the latest Stable release of Swift. Since Swift is written in Java, this package will run on all supported platforms with Java Runtime Environment 1.6 or greater.

I’m less impressed the more I look into it.

5 Romantic Heretic  Jun 3, 2014 9:05:22pm

I’m kind of wondering what’s so amazing about it.

Back before I quite being a computer programmer I exclusively used 4th Dimension to create my programs. It was largely visual in nature. It was also a true object oriented programming formalism. It also had all finds of add ons like report generators and spreadsheets.

The lovely things I could do with all that.

It never seemed to take off though. I suspect that it was too ‘un-C-like’ to be popular.

6 jonhendry  Jun 3, 2014 10:51:36pm

re: #2 William Barnett-Lewis

We’ll see. Apple’s track record on this kind of thing is hardly inspiring.

Look up a delightful but essentially dead programming language called Dylan for example. It was to be the same thing as this but for the Newton.

I think I found the problem there.

More to the point, Swift is compatible with the extensive Apple class libraries used to develop applications for both iOS devices and OS X, and a single project can contain both Swift and Objective-C code. So the benefits of the new language aren’t limited to a new platform that’s trying to build some momentum.

There were never half a billion people using Newtons, or a million Newton applications on the market.

7 jonhendry  Jun 3, 2014 10:52:34pm

re: #4 William Barnett-Lewis

That’s a different language called Swift. Apple’s linking to it as a courtesy, because it already existed and people may end up at Apple’s site when they want the other one, but it’s a different thing entirely.

Apple’s Swift doesn’t involve Java at all.

8 Origuy  Jun 5, 2014 1:52:13am

re: #3 dog philosopher

dunno why they don’t just use java

Probably because Oracle owns it and is tightening its grip on it, not to mention screwing it up.


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