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"I look at the feature set of Swift, and I have to ask myself the question: what’s the point? What is really trying to be solved? And does it provide significan
by krilnon 12y ago
"I look at the feature set of Swift, and I have to ask myself the question: what’s the point? What is really trying to be solved? And does it provide significant benefits over languages that already exist?"
One reason may be that large companies want ownership of a modern, C#/Java/Go-like language [1]. I was an intern at Adobe when it was trying to develop such a language (ActionScript 4) + VM, and a primary reason not to adopt an existing language is that they wanted control and to be free of legacy baggage as much as possible. Obj-C is reasonable to use today, but its C and Smalltalk underpinnings sometimes feel like anachronisms for people writing App Store apps. This is probably especially true if you're a language designer like Chris Lattner at Apple and are tasked with fixing the most prominent pain points that your language users face.
[1] I realize these are somewhat diverse languages.
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago> One reason may be that large companies want ownership of a modern, C#/Java/Go-like language Quite true. A major reason why c# exists is that circa 2000, Microsoft wanted ownership of a modern, Java-like language.