> What irritates me is when people say classes are bad. Or subclassing is bad. Thatʼs totally false. Classes are super important. Reference semantics are super important. If anything, the thing thatʼs wrong is to say, one thing is bad and the other thing is good. These are all different tools in our toolbox, and theyʼre used to solve different kinds of problems.<p>Couldn't agree more
Interesting interview. Java is mentioned many times as language Swift aspires to replace. He is right about Kotlin:<p>"Kotlin is very reference semantics, itʼs a thin layer on top of Java, and so it perpetuates through a lot of the Javaisms in its model.<p>If we had done an analog to that for Objective-C it would be like, everything is an NSObject and itʼs objc_msgSend everywhere, just with parentheses instead of square brackets. .."<p>I think Swift has real chance to reach Java level popularity. It is already at #11 in Redmonk ranking. All languages above Swift are at least 15 year older than Swift. And once it server side features like concurrency it can be much more general purpose.
Wow, he just really really does not like C++. He is certainly an extremely knowledgeable C++ guy, obviously Swift is written in C++, but it's hard to entirely agree with his opinion on it across all fronts.
><i>Look at Javascript or any of these other languages out there. They started with a simple premise (“I want to do simple scripting in a web browser”) and now people are writing freaking server apps in it. What happened there? Is there a logical leap that was missed? How is this a good idea? [Audience laughs] Sorry, I love Javascript too. Iʼd just love to kill it even more.</i><p>Emphasis mine. Not that I disagree completely...
I think that very important aspect of achieving world domination for Swift is front-end development for Web (with compiler targeting JS or Web Assembly)<p>In a way many iOS and macOS applications are front-end software. It much more makes sense to make Swift available for other kinds of front-end development that for server-side coding.
> My goal for Swift has always been and still is total world domination<p>I hope that this is never happen. Swift is great, it's universal and it saves you a lot of time during coding, BUT It also has very large syntax and high number of features - documentation is huge! The most of swift programmers probably don't know complete syntax and all features which is problem in a world where we code in teams and work with open source(both cases mean that you work with code you didn't write).<p>We just need new simple way how billions of people can explain computers what to do and backwards understand what computer was told to do and I'm sure that it's not Swift, Java or C++.
BTW: Before we get too deep in specific language criticisms, let's not forget that Chris Lattner is awesome. The fact that two super smart guys with huge work ethics like Chris and Elon Musk couldn't get along is very disappointing to me.
Could someone explain why I should build a language developed entirely by and for writing Apple ecosystem products? It seems like if I'm not targeting MacOS or iOS directly, the long list of benefits suddenly looks much, much smaller compared to e.g. JVM, .NET, Go, etc etc.<p>"letʼs start hacking, letʼs start building something, letʼs see where it goes pulling on the string" feels scarily accurate, and it's unclear where the language will be in 5 years.<p>Among other things, there's no way to disable objective-c interop, even though it complicates the language and feels like someone merged smalltalk, C++, and ML—not a pretty combination. But—literally the only reason you'd enable that would be to work with Cocoa/UIKit.<p>I'm still out on ARC—it was much less of a problem than I expected on my last project, but it never feels like an optimal solution, and you can never just "forget about it for the first draft" the way you can a VM's GC.