[swift-users] "business applications market" flame

[Dru Satori]

I would argue that the language syntax is forgiving though, as my follow examples demonstrated.

The funny thing, is that your point about minutes versus hours is the very reason BASIC came to be ( easier math language ). But I think to a degree, we are discussing semantics. It seems we agree on the principle, that Swift is good, but it isn’t there as general purpose business dev language. :)



From: Jens Alfke <jens at mooseyard.com<mailto:jens at mooseyard.com>>
Date: Wednesday, January 6, 2016 at 7:40 PM
To: Andy Satori <dru at druware.com<mailto:dru at druware.com>>
Cc: Don Wills <don.wills at portablesoftware.com<mailto:don.wills at portablesoftware.com>>, Donald Pinckney <djpinckney at ucdavis.edu<mailto:djpinckney at ucdavis.edu>>, "swift-users at swift.org<mailto:swift-users at swift.org>" <swift-users at swift.org<mailto:swift-users at swift.org>>
Subject: Re: [swift-users] "business applications market" flame


On Jan 6, 2016, at 4:27 PM, Dru Satori <dru at druware.com<mailto: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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