[swift-users] "business applications market" flame

[Jens Alfke]

> On Jan 6, 2016, at 2:49 PM, Dru Satori <dru at druware.com> wrote:
> 
> It may use LLVM, but it is not a “C” style language, in fact, it feels more like a scripting language than many languages at this level.

I disagree. Scripting languages are pretty universally dynamically-typed, interpreted, and have no visible compile/link stage. Swift isn’t like that at all. The clear ancestors are the C family (including Obj-C), Haskell (IIRC), and to a lesser degree Rust and Go. I don’t see any resemblance to Perl, Ruby, Python, etc.

I agree with the rest of what you’re saying, but it’s pretty obvious. The kinds of business you’re describing are conservative and just use what everyone else uses, and what every developer learns in school. 20 years ago they were probably using C or Pascal, 30 years ago it was probably COBOL. These are not early adopters.

Newer languages tend to fly under the radar for a while. There’s a growing use of Go, for example. (My employer, Couchbase, is using it in several shipping products.) Inside big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter there are all sorts of interesting languages being used internally, from Scala to Haskell. (Go is of course an obvious case of that.)

At this point Swift doesn’t even have a robust cross-platform standard library, so it’s way too early to start trying to sell it as a replacement for Java to enterprise coders. Right now Swift’s practical uses are for building iOS and Mac applications, period. But that’s going to change.

—Jens
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