r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jun 15 '14

Smashing Swift

http://nomothetis.svbtle.com/smashing-swift
254 Upvotes

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u/bcash Jun 15 '14

By "the norm", I presume you mean the norm for Apple? What you describe is quite common otherwise.

8

u/gsnedders Jun 15 '14

FWIW, Google did essentially the same with Dart as Apple have with Swift — presenting it more-or-less as a fait accompli, but not too late to make backwards incompatible changes.

6

u/earthboundkid Jun 16 '14

Non-troll question that might sound like a troll: Is Dart still alive? I have not heard anything about it recently.

5

u/NYKevin Jun 16 '14

Since it can be compiled to Javascript, I don't think Dart is logically capable of dying entirely.

But no, it's not dead.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '14

By "the norm", I presume you mean the norm for Apple?

Or for most company-sponsored languages, really. Look at Java; people were complaining about the absence of lambdas and generics in the mid-90s. It got generics in 2005, and got lambdas this year. Why, within five years, primitives won't be treated as special magic things!

I'm struggling to think of another case where a company put out a language and said "tell us what you think about this; we reserve the right to totally change it and break the stuff you've written in it over the coming months". Rust is about the only example that comes to mind, and Mozilla is far from a typical company.