Apple’s Swift programming language is now open source

9 to 5 Mac ^ | December 4, 2015 | By Benjamin Mayo

[Westbrook]

As for tuples, support, you can find it in the C++ Boost library.

I think C++ 2014 also has it.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Compiled. It’s similarity to Python was just the syntax and some simplifications.

Python is interpreted as you may well know, and that opens up a whole new bag of tricks.

I don’t know if you ever used Objective C. I found it to be a royal pain in the ass and very aged. It’s kind of a hack. The single biggest improvement is you don’t have to allocate memory for your objects in a separate step as you did with OBJ C.

Apple let development go to seed for many years and now they are trying to become relevant again. I think the ObjC coders are becoming what the old COBOL coders are now.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

I never really used them until I did Python development. Of course there are other ways to get the same result but they really make for cleaner looking code, in less time.

[ThunderSleeps]

Apple's language goes open source. - ANDROID PING!
Android Ping! If you want on or off the Android Ping List, Freepmail me.

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As someone with more than a passing interest in software development... It looks interesting but... Is it just a re-spin of C, Objective-C, C#, C++, Java, even csh (all built on mostly C-ish syntax)??? With all those languages out there with so much overlap... I'm left wondering what the allure is, what would be the compelling reason for me to learn yet another programming language? Maybe, if I were an iOS developer??? I just don't see this moving outside that realm. My next language, one that I believe will be far more useful to me, that I'm currently learning is OpenCL.

[Swordmaker]

I saw that the article was by someone else, but you used your declaration of your own commitment to the iPad Pro as the hypertext for that link. I thought I was responding to that.

Reply #7 starts by saying "more:" and then the rest is a block quote from ZDNet of an article by Kevin Tofel entitled "After Apple open sources it, IBM puts Swift programming in the cloud" and that hyperlink is in that article.

I gave my iPad Air to my girlfriend and am using the iPad Pro as my primary iPad now. However I do most of my posting with my new MacBook.

As to font size. Using any iPad in landscape mode with FreeRepublic will increase the text size and double tapping the screen will fill the screen with the column, also increasing the text. I've used Microsoft Windows computers to browse FR and find the font size unacceptable and many websites are so small as to be unreadable.

I take it you are using the separate keyboard?

No, I haven't bought one yet. The reviews were less than stellar on Apple's keyboard and several third party keyboards rate higher. I am waiting to decide which I will select. It may be I will buy Apple's but it also may be that I will not buy any. I've bought several over the years for my other iPads and have never found that I used them. I can't see that I would use one with the iPad Pro either. I am quite proficient with a virtual keyboard on the screen. However the newly laid out keyboard for the iPad Pro is requiring me to force my hands to re-learn well trained muscle memories of touch typing to change after years of experience. For example the right and left carets for control characters in HTML are not in the same shifted keyboard they were on the older iPad but are now back in the standard Mac keyboard position. That takes relearning how to reach them. That's a bit frustrating when the hands recall using a different key to switch to the secondary keyboard for a left or right carat symbol. Similarly, there are more keys which when held now offer their shifted equivalents. Convenient but different.

Time was, OS X had macro capability so that you could assign text strings to key combos. I used that for awhile, but it seemingly went away a few upgrades ago. Sure would be nice, pending John Robinson's finding the gremlin which is making the HTML hash up my quotation marks and apostrophes. Really wouldn't be a true substitute, because even if I do put in & rsquo; instead of ' the character altho displayed correctly does not come out right if someone tries to copy and paste it in a reply.

Macros are still available in OS X and are even more robust. I use them regularly to set HTML codes for things like setting and closing Blockquotes, complete hypertext links, text color and text size, etc.

[Westbrook]

I’ve never used Objective C, but I’ve used C++ extensively for application development in both the Windows and Linux environments. I’ve settled on Qt as a development platform for the last 5 or so years, because it is somewhat platform independent.

My everyday coding language is C. That is the language of the Linux Kernel, and that is where I spend most of my time.

I’ve looked into Python, but the rigid indentation syntax was a loser in my estimation. I indent in C and C++, of course, but those languages use brackets to locate code blocks. As far as I can tell, this is not the case with Python.

For interpreted language, I just use bash script. I’ve dabbled in Perl, but I like bash the best.

C is so easy for me, that the extra compilation step doesn’t bug me.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

The indention was a brief turnoff for me with Python, but an IDE like Pycharm makes it a lot simpler and I didn’t miss the little {brackets} at all. Pycharm also has great support for VM’s, remote debugging and deployment.

I do some Unix work too and found Python to be a good replacement for Bash and Korn for anything needing any logic.

We had a Data Warehouse load that was using 100+ scripts and was a support nightmare. One Python App with external configuration via XML Documents replaced them all.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Convenient but different.

I am still getting used to the Force Touch trackpad a month after buying it . . .