Not innovative compared to what? Haskell? Unfinished betas like Rust? Some language 100 people use (plus 1-2 banks and a couple of universities)?
This is a language that will jump in the top ten of most used languages in a year or so, just because it's used in a hugely popular development platform. And it had to fulfil several things to achieve that.
>They could've hired some smart people from more software-oriented companies or something
Because Chris Lattner, the guy behind the infrastructure of tens of new languages and one of the most popular C/C++ compilers, is not smart enough right? Or the team that created Swift.
And which company would that be? Go, for one, is like a 1980 language compared to Swift. And C# had 14 years to evolve, and didn't have the same functionality constrains Swift has handicapped with at all.
It is somewhat unfair to dismiss Rust as an unfinished beta in comments on an article that demonstrates how the Swift compiler isn't even up to beta standards.
Swift is a nice language for sure. It picks up nicest features of many other language and doesn't trade that off with many annoyancies (from what I've seen so far). It also appears like a very accessible language. It breaks with older languages where those older languages are bad (eg "==" vs "===") but mostly sticks to things that work and are familiar. I think these criteria are important for what I think is "good language design".
Swift is not in any reasonable sense an innovative language. There is really nothing in there that is new. Now you can get worked up about that, or just accept that innovativity is really something far less important (or perhaps even undesirable) when compared to "good design" for Swift. Especially given its unique position.
>It is somewhat unfair to dismiss Rust as an unfinished beta in comments on an article that demonstrates how the Swift compiler isn't even up to beta standards.
I agree, didn't intent to dismiss Rust per se -- I like Rust.
Just wanted to give a perspective. Swift is in beta (and buggy), but Rust (if the OP compared it to that), isn't even syntactically stable.
Based on what we know, Swift will be in a (pretty much) stable condition come Fall, for the OS X release.
Not innovative compared to what? Haskell? Unfinished betas like Rust? Some language 100 people use (plus 1-2 banks and a couple of universities)?
This is a language that will jump in the top ten of most used languages in a year or so, just because it's used in a hugely popular development platform. And it had to fulfil several things to achieve that.
>They could've hired some smart people from more software-oriented companies or something
Because Chris Lattner, the guy behind the infrastructure of tens of new languages and one of the most popular C/C++ compilers, is not smart enough right? Or the team that created Swift.
And which company would that be? Go, for one, is like a 1980 language compared to Swift. And C# had 14 years to evolve, and didn't have the same functionality constrains Swift has handicapped with at all.