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Can someone sell me on Swift over dart or kotlin? They seem to be direct competitors. Since we're talking about the future of programming, can someone sell me

by hajile 7y ago

Can someone sell me on Swift over dart or kotlin? They seem to be direct competitors. Since we're talking about the future of programming, can someone sell me on Swift instead of ocaml, SML, or F#? I don't see a good reason to pick it outside of targeting Apple devices.

zozbot234 7y ago
The nice thing about Swift is that many broad programming patterns will ultimately be shared between Swift and Rust, and Swift has better support on Apple platforms. That's quite nice if everything you've had available before was Objective C or Objective/C++.
tambourine_man 7y ago
At the moment, there isn’t.
pjmlp 7y ago
Many developers focus on a single platform, so for those living on Apple world, Swift is an welcomed improvement over Objective-C. Outside of Apple platforms it is pretty much WIP.
biggestdecision 7y ago
I mean, that is the only reason. It's a first party language in the Apple ecosystem. If you are working outside that ecosystem, there are better choices.
RandallBrown 7y ago
Outside of targeting Apple devices, the biggest upside would probably be that way more people are using and writing about Swift than those other languages.
rb808 7y ago
> dart or kotlin? ... ocaml, SML, or F# + scala, go, rust, elixir/erlang Yeah its so much time to learn all this stuff. Its a good reason they probably will all fade, better stick to js/python/java/C#/C++ like everyone else and wait.
- leonidasv 7y ago
  > better stick to js/python/java/C#/C++ like everyone else I would change Java to Kotlin here, since Kotlin has a 1:1 interop with Java while having goodies like null safety, type inference and functional programming without the academicism of Scala (and its slow compilation time). If you also account for the smooth learning, Kotlin is probably the safest bet from these 9 mentioned. A lot of businesses with Java codebases are already messing with it (and not only for Android).
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    How does that 1:1 interop work for calling Kotlin co-routines from Java, or stuff without @JVM... annotations for that matter?
  - rb808 7y ago
    Yeah I like Kotlin. The problem is I liked Scala, Erlang and Go as well and I spent a lot of time learning those and eventually discarding them.
twblalock 7y ago
> Since we're talking about the future of programming, can someone sell me on Swift instead of ocaml, SML, or F#? I don't think the industry is likely to adopt functional languages. What people in the industry seem to want are safer programs with better null handling (e.g. optionals), friendly handling of async programming (e.g. futures/promises/async await), map/filter/reduce, immutable data types, and similar features that make programs safer and easier to write. Yet, the industry does not want to give up the object-oriented paradigm or the ability to do non-functional-programming stuff. I think the future of programming languages is going to be hybrid languages rather than functional languages, simply because they are easier to adopt. In some cases, existing languages are absorbing those new features, so many companies are benefitting from them without switching languages. Of the alternatives you mentioned, F# is the closest to being a hybrid language because of its integration with the .NET platform. Similar languages include Scala, JavaScript, Java since Java 8, Swift, Kotlin, etc. Python now has some of this stuff too. On the other hand, Go is notable for rejecting functional features and it is also growing in popularity.
leonidasv 7y ago
Excuse me, but what makes you think of OCaml, SML and F# as "future of programming"? As much as I like OCaml, for example, I don't see it being mass-adopted in the near future, nor its tooling reaching the state of more established languages. All those languages you mentioned are most likely to continue being just niche ones. The only mostly-functional language I can see being mass-adopted right now is Elixir, and it still has a long way to go.
- lostmsu 7y ago
  What is Elixir?
Gibbon1 7y ago
One of Swift's design goals is a stable ABI. That's worth something.

by hajile 7y ago

zozbot234 7y ago

The nice thing about Swift is that many broad programming patterns will ultimately be shared between Swift and Rust, and Swift has better support on Apple platforms. That's quite nice if everything you've had available before was Objective C or Objective/C++.

tambourine_man 7y ago

At the moment, there isn’t.

pjmlp 7y ago

Many developers focus on a single platform, so for those living on Apple world, Swift is an welcomed improvement over Objective-C. Outside of Apple platforms it is pretty much WIP.

biggestdecision 7y ago

I mean, that is the only reason. It's a first party language in the Apple ecosystem. If you are working outside that ecosystem, there are better choices.

RandallBrown 7y ago

Outside of targeting Apple devices, the biggest upside would probably be that way more people are using and writing about Swift than those other languages.

rb808 7y ago

> dart or kotlin? ... ocaml, SML, or F# + scala, go, rust, elixir/erlang Yeah its so much time to learn all this stuff. Its a good reason they probably will all fade, better stick to js/python/java/C#/C++ like everyone else and wait.

leonidasv 7y ago
> better stick to js/python/java/C#/C++ like everyone else I would change Java to Kotlin here, since Kotlin has a 1:1 interop with Java while having goodies like null safety, type inference and functional programming without the academicism of Scala (and its slow compilation time). If you also account for the smooth learning, Kotlin is probably the safest bet from these 9 mentioned. A lot of businesses with Java codebases are already messing with it (and not only for Android).
- pjmlp 7y ago
  How does that 1:1 interop work for calling Kotlin co-routines from Java, or stuff without @JVM... annotations for that matter?
- rb808 7y ago
  Yeah I like Kotlin. The problem is I liked Scala, Erlang and Go as well and I spent a lot of time learning those and eventually discarding them.

twblalock 7y ago

> Since we're talking about the future of programming, can someone sell me on Swift instead of ocaml, SML, or F#? I don't think the industry is likely to adopt functional languages. What people in the industry seem to want are safer programs with better null handling (e.g. optionals), friendly handling of async programming (e.g. futures/promises/async await), map/filter/reduce, immutable data types, and similar features that make programs safer and easier to write. Yet, the industry does not want to give up the object-oriented paradigm or the ability to do non-functional-programming stuff. I think the future of programming languages is going to be hybrid languages rather than functional languages, simply because they are easier to adopt. In some cases, existing languages are absorbing those new features, so many companies are benefitting from them without switching languages. Of the alternatives you mentioned, F# is the closest to being a hybrid language because of its integration with the .NET platform. Similar languages include Scala, JavaScript, Java since Java 8, Swift, Kotlin, etc. Python now has some of this stuff too. On the other hand, Go is notable for rejecting functional features and it is also growing in popularity.

leonidasv 7y ago

Excuse me, but what makes you think of OCaml, SML and F# as "future of programming"? As much as I like OCaml, for example, I don't see it being mass-adopted in the near future, nor its tooling reaching the state of more established languages. All those languages you mentioned are most likely to continue being just niche ones. The only mostly-functional language I can see being mass-adopted right now is Elixir, and it still has a long way to go.

lostmsu 7y ago
What is Elixir?

Gibbon1 7y ago

One of Swift's design goals is a stable ABI. That's worth something.