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by danford 4293 days ago
Don't know why you're getting down voted, sure Swift has some neat features, but if any other company released something like this that was closed source, no one would really care.
5 comments

Any other company who's language runs over 1.3 million apps used by hundreds of millions of people on average every 6 minutes?
Oracle and Microsoft. But their languages (Java and C#) are not platform dependent.

Just an example:

>Microsoft released C# Roslyn source code, announce Linux support with K Runtime this year

They're going to the right direction, maybe someday...

>Apple released Swift, closed source language that runs only on one platform (Mac)

Apple is so awesome, keep innovating guys! Now let's write a webstack and nosql db using Swift!

C# is hideous to get running consistently (if at all) with recent versions and libraries cross platform. Perhaps this will change in the future, but they've not been particularly brilliant about it over the past decade
I don't know what libraries you talking about but nearly everything from nuget starting with image processing and ending with orms and crypto work just fine on linux.

Even more when K will come out I don't think there will be any worries at all.

NuGet doesn't quite work just fine on Linux, but it's getting better. Slowly.

http://nuget.codeplex.com/SourceControl/network/forks/threed...

Yea, maybe, I don't even know. I develop on Windows and only deploy to Linux.

Let's just hope that with the release of VS2014 and K Runtime all those things will get solved like MS promised.

He's getting down voted because his assertion that the attention paid to Swift is driven entirely by hipsterism is Slashdot-esque nonsense. People who make a living writing Objective-C will be making a living writing Swift.
Because calling people "hipsters" for liking a new language is juvenile.
is/was Javascript open source?

what matters is the platform

no one cared if Javascript the language was open source when it was the only way to do client side scripting for web pages.

similarly Swift has iOS and OSX - other languages are available on these but I guess developers are anticipating Apple emphasising Swift over Objective-C going forward

Well it's hard to say that JS had this much attention in 1995. Let's give swift 20 years and see where it takes us?
No other company has a platform with hundreds of millions of users where the first-party app development language is so old and crusty.
Java compatibility and NDK ...