Objective C never kept me away and I love JavaScript, I really don’t think Swift makes things that much better, it’s just different.

What similarities does Swift have to JS at all? There are some with Python, though not many.

from https://www.tutorialspoint.com (high seo, I do not personally endorse)

Objective-C:

    - (return_type) method_name:( argumentType1 )argumentName1   
    joiningArgument2:( argumentType2 )argumentName2 ...  
    joiningArgumentn:( argumentTypen )argumentNamen  
    {  
       body of the function  
    }

Swift:

    func funcname(Parameters) -> returntype {  
       Statement1  
       Statement2  
       ---  
       Statement N  
       return parameters  
    }

Javascript:

    function functionname(parameter-list)  
    {  
        statements  
    }

I know people downvoted op, but when I first learned it, reading Objective-C made me angry. The second two examples are much closer in syntax and style and require much less context switching.

And it wasn't mentioned, but the if let myVar = optionalVar { ... } is a godsend for writing maintainable, crash-free code.

If you want to get a good idea of what good swift looks like, check out https://github.com/raywenderlich/swift-style-guide

This is just a visual and fairly shallow similarity. I think the context switch is huge and the same as Objective C.

Anyway the future isn’t Swift, it’s JavaScript for everyone :-)

Altho TBH most of the objections I've heard against ObjC from non-ObjC developers usually are just as shallow and revolve around how weird or ugly the bracket syntax for messages is.

my objections to obj C are code quality, pointers and crash rates.

Visual affects reading which affects comprehension.

Don’t dismiss visual similarities so out of hand.

It matters yes, I’ve never been completely comfortable with Python and Lua because of their style but in the example above how is the Swift better than the Objective-C? Sure the params syntax is cleaner here but then you have the return type (with the ugly arrow) at the end instead of the start of the line which is unusual compared to many other c style syntax languages and you also lose the -/+ instance/class method syntax i always liked in Objective-C. JavaScript of course doesn’t have to supply a return type at all, I just don’t see how any of this helps someone coming from JS/Python/Ruby combined with the deeper understand required around nullables and types.

> reading Objective-C made me angry

Yet, many programmers love Smalltalk, which is where this "new" syntax came from.

It's just getting used to []][[][]] and having brackets and @property and lots of things a little different that most first languages people learn nowadays. If you're coming from C, then moving to Objective-C might feel different than coming from languages people tend to learn first nowadays. As someone coming from C++ (and others) when I started programming 4ish years ago, it definitely felt unnatural, but learned to appreciated it a lot and found it pretty sensible. Except for blocks...

It has made me really want to look into learning Smalltalk as a throwback hobby.

You're totally right, after a while you get used to it.

i agree with all your points , but despite the superficial syntax similarity, Swift’s strong typing, optionals and slow compilation make it the anti-javascript.

Could not agree more. Let's install Java to build something that does not needs Java at all. They could have used Go, Python, hell even something like CMake.

This seems like a packaging problem. In Java 9, it's possible to produce a single binary containing the JRE and application code; same way as go producing a single binary containing the Go runtime and application code.

> Python

Then you have to install the right version of python, and you get even more of a nightmare than a Java install. At least the Java ecosystem doesn't suggest a separate tool (eg, virtualenv or similar) to support things like JAVA_HOME.

This applies equally to any non-statically-compiled application distribution; I don't see CMake files + some specially blessed CMake version that you also have to install as coming close to that.

It's not immediately useful, but you might find this interesting:

https://github.com/google/skylark

I may be missing something here, since I've not heard of Skylark (the Python variation itself not Google's Go-based interpreter for Skylark) but my brief searching suggests it's abandoned..?

Skylark is the name of the build language used by Bazel, Google's build system. The main version is written in Java, but isn't available separately from Bazel as far as I know. Definitely not abandoned; most teams at Google use it.

The Go version is new and I don't know what it's used for.

That is so f! Cool!!! I have been looking for this!

Are you on Windows? If so, Bazel now bundles the JDK so you should not have to worry about Java.

I wonder how its implemented. I think its possible to do run this type of service at a very large scale for extremely low costs using AWS Lambda and Cloudwatch events.