[swift-users] "business applications market" flame

[Jens Alfke]

> On Jan 6, 2016, at 4:27 PM, Dru Satori <dru at druware.com> wrote:
> 
> The thing that I see about Swift is that right now, today, on Linux or OS X, if Swift is installed, I can open a terminal: 
> 
> Touch hello.swift
> vim hello.swift
> i 
> print("Hello Swift");
> Esc
> :wq
> swift hello.swift

You can do that with C too:

	touch hello.c
	vim hello.c
	i
	#include <stdio.h>
	int main() {printf(“Hello World!”); return 0;}
	Esc
	:wq
	cc hello.c && ./a.out

Does that make C a scripting language? :)

Having a REPL or playgrounds doesn’t really change what the language itself is; it just indicates good integration of the compiler into the development tools.

To me, what defines a scripting language is a forgiving syntax that lets you bang stuff out fast without worrying about types, and super high level libraries for doing file and text manipulation and running other processes. By contrast, even if I had a C REPL and playgrounds, it would still be a pain to use C to process a directory full of text files and transform their contents and pass that to another tool. Whereas I could do it in minutes with Ruby or bash.

—Jens
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