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I don't mean this as a criticism, but it's amusing how the Go community is slowly inventing Swift. - "Protocols" that can be used as both constraints on generi

I don't mean this as a criticism, but it's amusing how the Go community is slowly inventing Swift. - "Protocols" that can be used as both constraints on generic parameters, and existential types - Operator requirements in protocols - Associated types All of the above introduces a huge amount of complexity too, and I imagine trying to retrofit it onto an existing language that does not have generics is going to be an interesting challenge.

atombender 8y ago
To be fair, Swift is on another level, and doesn't strive for Go's rather relentless minimalism. Go, even with these additions, would be a lot smaller than Swift, which was intentionally designed around rich, complex abstractions, including generics and compile-time type constraints, from the start. Of course, Swift didn't exactly pioneer these concepts. Scala, C# and Haskell also provide compile-time type constraints that are heavily based on generics, and these languages also influenced Swift.
- jjtheblunt 8y ago
  It's always been "curious" that Swift never credited Scala, I thought.
  - thayne 8y ago
    My impression when I first saw swift code was "wow, that looks a lot like scala".
    - weego 8y ago
      Anecdotally as a mostly full time scala dev, swift has been the easiest "I'm bored this weekend I'll pick up a new language for side projects" I can remember.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Because these concepts are older than Scala and both languages inspired from the same sources?
- eternalban 8y ago
  "Go's rather relentless minimalism." Semantic minimalism, yes. But the produced artifacts are not "minimal". Go is something like IKEA of PLs, making hay with a "minimal" set of elements to play with. But there is only so far you can take plywood. And above is not a negative critique. It is a good niche to be in. But this effort for Go 2 to move upmarket (in PL land) using the plywood foundation is rather worrisome.
frou_dh 8y ago
The 10,000 foot view of there being many distinct industry-grade language platforms: Duplication of Effort

atombender 8y ago

To be fair, Swift is on another level, and doesn't strive for Go's rather relentless minimalism. Go, even with these additions, would be a lot smaller than Swift, which was intentionally designed around rich, complex abstractions, including generics and compile-time type constraints, from the start. Of course, Swift didn't exactly pioneer these concepts. Scala, C# and Haskell also provide compile-time type constraints that are heavily based on generics, and these languages also influenced Swift.

jjtheblunt 8y ago
It's always been "curious" that Swift never credited Scala, I thought.
- thayne 8y ago
  My impression when I first saw swift code was "wow, that looks a lot like scala".
  - weego 8y ago
    Anecdotally as a mostly full time scala dev, swift has been the easiest "I'm bored this weekend I'll pick up a new language for side projects" I can remember.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Because these concepts are older than Scala and both languages inspired from the same sources?
eternalban 8y ago
"Go's rather relentless minimalism." Semantic minimalism, yes. But the produced artifacts are not "minimal". Go is something like IKEA of PLs, making hay with a "minimal" set of elements to play with. But there is only so far you can take plywood. And above is not a negative critique. It is a good niche to be in. But this effort for Go 2 to move upmarket (in PL land) using the plywood foundation is rather worrisome.

frou_dh 8y ago

The 10,000 foot view of there being many distinct industry-grade language platforms: Duplication of Effort