Edge Cases 99: Swift Is a Really Good Thing and a Step Back

Edge Cases

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about the upsides (it will help advance the industry at large) and downsides (its disturbing lack of dynamism) of Swift.

Links:

• Then, You’re Just Writing C++ « Edge Cases
• Ken Ferry tweet: “@timburks @andyarvanitis yeah… I do think “Objective-C without the C” is just… false. I don’t know why they said that. It’s C++++.”
• Joachim Bengtsson tweet: ““Swift is like as if C++ was toll-free bridged to ObjC” — @saurik succinctly summarizes this weird new language”
• Why Apple’s Swift Language Will Instantly Remake Computer Programming « Wired
• AppleScript’s Glorious Failure « Edge Cases
• Drew McCormack tweet: “@chiefsucker Obj-C is a subset of Swift. The syntax of Swift is cleaner, but there are many more concepts than Obj-C.”
• Rafael Bugajewski tweet: “@drewmccormack Learning Swift in depth is harder, but I would argue that basic things are easier to learn for beginners.”
• Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution And The Meanings Of Life, by Daniel C. Dennett « Amazon.com
• Was Evolution the Greatest Theory Ever? « The Friendly Atheist
• Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach, by Brad Cox and Andrew Novobilski « Amazon.com
• Bitly: Lessons Learned Building a Distributed System that Handles 6 Billion Clicks a Month « High Scalability
• A Few of My Favorite Things « Edge Cases
• Prototype-Based Programming « Edge Cases
• prototypes vs classes was: Re: Sun’s HotSpot « squeak-dev archive
• Programming and Scaling, by Alan Kay « tele-TASK Video
• history - So what *did* Alan Kay really mean by the term “object-oriented”? « Programmers Stack Exchange
• The Case for Message Passing in Swift « Buckleyisms.com
• Christian Kienle tweet: “You may be doing something wrong if #swiftlang ‘s vtable-performance gain is important to you.”
• [objc explain]: objc_msgSend_vtable « Sealie Software
• BeOS « Wikipedia
• Chris Lattner tweet: “Most perplexing feedback on Swift: folks who see it (and judge it) as the end of a trek - but don’t realize it is the start of a new world.”
• Instantiating Classes by Name in Swift « iJoshSmith
• Alien Reference Counting « Edge Cases

Rejected Episode Titles:

• Some U.N. Charter Thing
• Always One Step Ahead
• C++++
• C++ Without the C
• Crazy Amounts of Duplication
• Raised the Collective IQ of Programmers
• Definitely Kind of a Puff Piece
• We Have This Myopia
• Maybe He’s the New Rumsfeld
• The Weirdly-Named BACON Conference
• There’s No Message Sending in Swift!
• That’s Where the “V” in V-Table Comes From
• The Entire Compile-Time Business
• It’s Delayed Binding
• Everything Was Slow in the 10.0 Days
• It Makes Software Fragile
• He’s Got His Own Reality Distortion Field
• You’re in a World of Pain
• I’m on Team Alan Kay
• They’re Not Show-Stoppers
• A Horrible Temptation for Most People
• Jamming Stuff into a Giant, Static Codebase
• C4 All Over Again
• It Already Is Too Late
• We Don’t Get a Vote