4 ms·

I thought about sitting down and learning swift, but they make breaking changed so often I really can't justify the time yet. I'm very curious what IBM comes up

I thought about sitting down and learning swift, but they make breaking changed so often I really can't justify the time yet. I'm very curious what IBM comes up with, not sure yet why they're so interested in it other than LLVM. Interesting news anyways.

chadcmulligan 10y ago
as of v3 it is stable they say.
kalleboo 10y ago
This is why I avoided embracing Swift until this year - we started using it in parts of our app but the 200 breaking changes in our project every 6 months was a major PITA. Starting with Swift 3 they claim to be source-stable which is why I've dared embrace it wholeheartedly now.
- cyphreak 10y ago
  Well but now scala (what I knew and just kept running with) is getting native compiler, eventually iOS support, academic underlying calculus for the language, all kinds of good stuff. I have a lot of respect for Lattner, obviously, but Swift has spent a LOT of goodwill that people were willing to spare it. Unless IBM pulls a really good thing out of their hat, I fear that swift might be in a perl6 position where they finally made a language worth a shit, but ran out of gas as they reached top speed. I guess time will tell. I WANT swift to be awesome, but in order to make it a rational choice, I NEED swift to be stable, common, and approachable for new employees. (something scala can struggle with for some programmers) It's really gonna bum me out when swift4 gets announced this spring (/s) and completely ruins everything, and then swift5 would of course be announced around the time swift4 becomes even remotely stable. It's just been a disaster so far.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    In what concerns Apple OSes, just like with any other first class programming language developers that want to target them will not have any other option. All the language improvements Objective-C has got since Swift was made available, were only to improve the interoperability between both languages. Also just check the amount of WWDC talks from the past two years that still used Objective-C on their presentations. This is why it is so important to have OS vendors sponsor new languages.
    - cyphreak 10y ago
      That's why I don't understand why IBM would give a shit about some thing specifically not designed for non-apple OSes
pjmlp 10y ago
> I'm very curious what IBM comes up with, not sure yet why they're so interested in it other than LLVM. They are diversifying outside Java as their bet on enterprise languages. J9 (their JVM) has been modularized and became the basis of Eclipse OMR, an infrastructure to implement programming languages, with existing support for PHP, Python and Ruby. Swift is yet another card in the deck.
- cyphreak 10y ago
  I wish they'd come help scala native out

chadcmulligan 10y ago

as of v3 it is stable they say.

kalleboo 10y ago

This is why I avoided embracing Swift until this year - we started using it in parts of our app but the 200 breaking changes in our project every 6 months was a major PITA. Starting with Swift 3 they claim to be source-stable which is why I've dared embrace it wholeheartedly now.

cyphreak 10y ago
Well but now scala (what I knew and just kept running with) is getting native compiler, eventually iOS support, academic underlying calculus for the language, all kinds of good stuff. I have a lot of respect for Lattner, obviously, but Swift has spent a LOT of goodwill that people were willing to spare it. Unless IBM pulls a really good thing out of their hat, I fear that swift might be in a perl6 position where they finally made a language worth a shit, but ran out of gas as they reached top speed. I guess time will tell. I WANT swift to be awesome, but in order to make it a rational choice, I NEED swift to be stable, common, and approachable for new employees. (something scala can struggle with for some programmers) It's really gonna bum me out when swift4 gets announced this spring (/s) and completely ruins everything, and then swift5 would of course be announced around the time swift4 becomes even remotely stable. It's just been a disaster so far.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  In what concerns Apple OSes, just like with any other first class programming language developers that want to target them will not have any other option. All the language improvements Objective-C has got since Swift was made available, were only to improve the interoperability between both languages. Also just check the amount of WWDC talks from the past two years that still used Objective-C on their presentations. This is why it is so important to have OS vendors sponsor new languages.
  - cyphreak 10y ago
    That's why I don't understand why IBM would give a shit about some thing specifically not designed for non-apple OSes

pjmlp 10y ago

> I'm very curious what IBM comes up with, not sure yet why they're so interested in it other than LLVM. They are diversifying outside Java as their bet on enterprise languages. J9 (their JVM) has been modularized and became the basis of Eclipse OMR, an infrastructure to implement programming languages, with existing support for PHP, Python and Ruby. Swift is yet another card in the deck.

cyphreak 10y ago
I wish they'd come help scala native out