3 ms·
Sibling comments mention Chris Lattner. For readers that might not know him, he's the main inventor of Swift. Him pushing Swift should not necessarily be taken
by peferron 8y ago
Sibling comments mention Chris Lattner. For readers that might not know him, he's the main inventor of Swift. Him pushing Swift should not necessarily be taken as a sign of general community enthusiasm.
I would love to see more Swift on the backend. It's surprisingly hard to find a language that's concise, expressive, statically typed, and easily accessible to beginners. Swift checks all these boxes.
That being said, it's much easier to succeed on the front-end when the only competitor is Objective-C (see: JavaScript), than on the backend when the competitors are Go, Rust, Elixir, Python, Node, C++, Java and more, all with large ecosystems already in place.
Swift may succeed in a niche, and "Swift for TensorFlow" appears to be an attempt at that, but I don't think it will become ubiquitous (call it traditional HN negativity).
- pjmlp 8y agoHe started a podcast last year to promote Swift outside Apple platforms, it lasted three episodes.
- saagarjha 8y agoWhich podcast are you talking about?
- pjmlp 8y agoThis one https://www.swiftcommunitypodcast.org/ https://www.swiftcommunitypodcast.org/
- saagarjha 8y agoAs far as I can tell, that podcast was started earlier this year, and is still active?
- pjmlp 8y agoRight, I was wrong about the start date, on my mind it was started in December. As for being active, no signs of life since 08th February, more than one month without updates.
- saagarjha 8y agoThere's still stuff going on on the GitHub repository: https://github.com/SwiftCommunityPodcast/podcast https://github.com/SwiftCommunityPodcast/podcast
- pjmlp 8y agoSo in one and half months they haven't found time nor a volunteer willing to do another podcast? My favourite podcasts have weekly and bi-weekly updates.
- the_duke 8y agoSwift is a great language. The main problem for me is that it's still very Apple centric. Other platforms are still very second class. For Linux, there are only Ubuntu packages. Even on Arch which is usually front of the pack with these things, there are only brittle third party (AUR) packages. Windows support is even worse.