“When Apple unveiled a new programming language at its World Wide Developers Conference on Monday, the place went ‘nuts,’ erupting with raucous cheers and applause,” Cade Metz reports for Wired.
“WWDC is a gathering of people who build software applications for Apple hardware devices — from the iPhone and the iPad to the Mac — and with its new language, dubbed Swift, Apple is apparently providing a much faster and more effective means of doing so, significantly improving on its current language of choice, Objective-C,” Metz reports. “With something that Apple calls an ‘interactive playground,’ Swift is even exploring a highly visual kind of programming that may go beyond other mainstream languages. All those developers went nuts not only because they love Apple, but because the new language could make their lives that much easier.”
“Swift seems to extend Apple’s split with the rest of the software development universe. Many coders would prefer that Apple shift toward tools that would also let them build software for other machines from other vendors. But Tim Cook and company are traveling in the opposite direction. ‘Swift has all the right check boxes, but do we really need something that’s proprietary to Apple’s platform?’ asks programming guru David Pollak. ‘Yes, it solves a lot problems, but it’s yet another way to drive a wedge between iOS development and everything else,'” Metz reports. “This is unlikely to harm Apple any time soon. In fact, the company prefers things this way. It insists on defining its own rules, and its devices are so widely used, it knows that large numbers of developers will happily build apps for them no matter what language this requires, driven by the enormous dollars signs they see in names like the iPhone and the Mac.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The more time developers spend in Apple’s superior and rewarding environment, the less time they have to waste slumming it with inferior operating systems.
Android et al. are destined to become even more afterthought backwaters than they are today.
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