Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by stefantalpalaru | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

stefantalpalaru

Why is a programming language without any open source implementation getting so much attention?

View on HN

Because:

- it brings interactive programming concepts (Playgrounds) into many mainstream developers.

- it belongs to the ML language family

- it recognizes the advances in mainstream computing in the last 30 years

- not everyone like to type @somekeyord and [some method call] everywhere.

- many of us do buy development tools and open source is just a nice to have feature

> - many of us do buy development tools and open source is just a nice to have feature

I realize this seems nit-pick-y (and for that I apologize), but that's a false dichotomy.

Open source != free. It's possible to pay/buy open source software.

Yes, but I am yet to meet pure open source advocates that pay for more than just hardware.

Is this a rhetorical question ?

iOS is the lead platform for mobile app development. It is also by far the most lucrative both in terms of sales and the quality of the users i.e. for non-sales revenue. Hence there are going to more than a few developers on here interested in it.

We see posts all the time for Go, Rust etc. Why would Swift be any different ?

Because it's Apple.

When Swift was released every hipster and his cat jumped the wagon on how great it is. I even saw someone trying to make webstack out of it.

Don't know why you're getting down voted, sure Swift has some neat features, but if any other company released something like this that was closed source, no one would really care.

is/was Javascript open source?

what matters is the platform

no one cared if Javascript the language was open source when it was the only way to do client side scripting for web pages.

similarly Swift has iOS and OSX - other languages are available on these but I guess developers are anticipating Apple emphasising Swift over Objective-C going forward

Well it's hard to say that JS had this much attention in 1995. Let's give swift 20 years and see where it takes us?

Any other company who's language runs over 1.3 million apps used by hundreds of millions of people on average every 6 minutes?

Oracle and Microsoft. But their languages (Java and C#) are not platform dependent.

Just an example:

>Microsoft released C# Roslyn source code, announce Linux support with K Runtime this year

They're going to the right direction, maybe someday...

>Apple released Swift, closed source language that runs only on one platform (Mac)

Apple is so awesome, keep innovating guys! Now let's write a webstack and nosql db using Swift!

C# is hideous to get running consistently (if at all) with recent versions and libraries cross platform. Perhaps this will change in the future, but they've not been particularly brilliant about it over the past decade

I don't know what libraries you talking about but nearly everything from nuget starting with image processing and ending with orms and crypto work just fine on linux.

Even more when K will come out I don't think there will be any worries at all.

NuGet doesn't quite work just fine on Linux, but it's getting better. Slowly.

http://nuget.codeplex.com/SourceControl/network/forks/threed...

Yea, maybe, I don't even know. I develop on Windows and only deploy to Linux.

Let's just hope that with the release of VS2014 and K Runtime all those things will get solved like MS promised.

No other company has a platform with hundreds of millions of users where the first-party app development language is so old and crusty.

Java compatibility and NDK ...

Because calling people "hipsters" for liking a new language is juvenile.

He's getting down voted because his assertion that the attention paid to Swift is driven entirely by hipsterism is Slashdot-esque nonsense. People who make a living writing Objective-C will be making a living writing Swift.

It couldn't be the quality of the language or the popularity of the platform. Just "hipsters".

Why does it matter that it's not open source? There is plenty of closed-source stuff on here all the time. Maybe it's getting attention because the iPhone is still an incredibly profitable platform to code for, and a lot of people on here are involved in that.

Because it's going to have more reach than most open source programming languages. In a few weeks, millions of people are going to be running Swift apps on their phones, tablets, and desktops.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com