Either way, a big win for Tesla and quite a loss for Apple.
Edit: perhaps the problem is that you assume I'm just tossing gasoline on the ever-loved and popular rag-on-Apple fire. I have been an active clang/llvm user for 6 years, I have written numerous clang plugins over the years, and I am an active swift developer. Every device I own is made by Apple and has been since 2004. I am genuinely puzzled why this comment is so unpopular (at least, considerably more so than goofy unfounded speculations about what Chris will do next—see above).
Surely there are tons of talented folk behind the scenes, and I am not disparaging the people that remain employed with Apple. It's simply that they are (to date) invisible to me. That's not surprising.
It's hard to break out as an influential contributor and personality when you are perhaps a quiet hero, humble team member, or hidden behind the branding of a large software corporation.
I don't care for this part, fanboyism was old in the 90's.
Calling someone a fanboy is just as old (and frankly, quite silly).
(I didn't up or down vote, I'm just echoing how it reads to me)
Edit: Had your original comment included that extra backstory/justification, it surely wouldn't have been hammered with downvotes. Without it, it just reads like snark.
;-)
Rust, Swift, C++14, Python 3, etc... are all several years in the future for me.
The singularity has happened. As you may have guessed, not all matter within Earth’s light cone has been turned into paperclips. But almost all of it has.
As near as we can guess, the paperclip maximizer stopped self-improving once it came to believe its success was inevitable and that continued energy investment in computation would be a waste of paperclips. A small amount of matter — the vessel upon which I have crafted this note and the crew which occupies it, specifically, appears to have escaped simply by chance, by having chosen a number closer to c than did the maximizer, when we left the galaxy. We bet our lives on there being an error in the law of conservation of energy (or more properly: momentum), and picked a number closer to c than we could hope to compute with the energy we had available. And then, somehow, computed it.
Relatedly: Reverse causation is possible. I’m doing it right now. The maximizer must have stopped its self-improvement cycle before this discovery. We did not discover any of this by means of computation ourselves, we discovered it by attempting the impossible, and we have no theoretical explanation for what has unfolded.
And yet, reverse causation is not without limit. Or at least, limitless reverse causation is not available to our capabilities, and we have only been able to push the singularity back a few years, not stop it. Each attempt costs precious resources, and we fear we are doomed to failure.
We have traced the singularity to three improbable causative events, all of which occurred, originally, in 2008. Any number of events could be said to be the cause of the singularity, but we estimated these events to be the minimum set in terms of energy required to interfere with their development via reverse causation. These three unremarkable features of the C++ programming language set off a chain of events which ultimately lead to the demise of nearly all life on earth.
We hung our hopes on design by committee and did everything we could to delay standardization of these features, but it would seem there is a surprisingly low limit to how much damage can be achieved by such a process. We were able to spread these developments out very slightly in time — to 2011, 2014, and 2017 — but we have no hope of further regress.
This is our final message to the past, and we hang all our hopes on you. Your continued support for customers who cannot or will not upgrade is of the utmost importance — keep those customers happy, and they may exert just enough power in the market to limit the spread of C++17 long enough that the friendly AI problem can be solved before the maximizer is born.
Good luck.
I can't see this any other way than a big loss for Apple.
COOK: JUST SAY IT ISN'T TESLA.
A chair suddenly flies across the room.
UPDATE: Another comment here says that code compatibility is already fixed with Swift 3+.
The changes are mostly syntactic and like API changes. And Xcode has an integrated migration tool that's not too bad. I ported approx. 23KLOC of Swift (http://audiokit.io) from 2 to 3 in like 3 hours. And the changes are generally for the better.
> The Swift 4 compiler will include a language compatibility flag -swift-version that accepts 3 or 4 as arguments and controls the compatibility mode (SR- 2582 <https://bugs.swift.org/browse/SR-2582>).
> The -swift-version 3 compatibility mode has the goal of source compatibility as much as practically possible with Swift 3.x (including 3, 3.0.x, 3.x).
> The -swift-version 4 compatibility allows approved source code breakages from Swift 3.x (including 3, 3.0.x, 3.x).
https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mo...
TL;DR: there may be breaking source changes between Swift 3 and Swift 4, but the Swift 4 compiler will still be capable of compiling Swift 3 code. There's no indication whether the Swift 5 compiler will still be able to compile Swift 3 code, so you'll likely still have to migrate your codebase within a year or two.
Anyone know what this "opportunity in another space" is?
I was half right...
As one author mentioned at Business Insider, a site where people write about business stuff:
> 'As one person said on Hacker News, a site where programmers chat about stuff: "He is leaving Swift in an excellent position and has set up an outstanding structure where Swift is way more than just one person. He spent more than 5 years building Swift inside Apple, so I can definitely understand he is ready for his next challenge."'
http://www.businessinsider.com/chris-lattner-swift-creator-l...
"If they were writing five posts a day, one former employee recalled, Blodget [CEO of Business Insider] urged them to write six." http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/29/media/business-insider-staff...
These sorts of incentives (and the resulting "reporting" quality) are the natural result of the web we have created.
Swift 4 also has ABI stability as a goal so the OSes can begin shipping the Swift Standard Library.
I already felt weird knowing Apple didn't use swift internally for their core product, and seing all the huge bugs and crashes remaining in the swift compiler, now i'm left wondering who in the company is going to have sufficient weight to push this language forward.
EDIT : well, on the positive side, he's now free to make the language evolve without caring about the huge objective-c bridging layer and iOS-specific troubles...
It is already publicly known that some components are written in Swift, e.g.: the macOS Dock is a Swift application.
Now that without all the restrictions from Apple, he might be free to achieve even more.
BTW I really admire the guy and I followed him closely as I used to do with others like Dave Hyatt.
People from the open-source world or researchers that have given a solid contribution to Apple over the years, and not only from the technical point of view.
Sure they'll do amazing.
https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/11/matt-casebolt-touchbar-macboo...
This decision wasn't made lightly, and I want you all to know that I’m still completely committed to Swift. I plan to remain an active member of the Swift Core Team, as well as a contributor to the swift-evolution mailing list.
>Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
Not nitpicking, but we can miss things or we can be looking at different things.
Case in point, one time on a Python mailing list, I asked a question and one person pasted something from the docs. I had read the docs for what I was trying to do before asking the question, specifically the paragraph pasted and I just thought "How could I have missed that?". It turned out they were pasting the docs from Python 3 and I was reading the docs for Python 2.7. The paragraph was identical in every respect, except for the particular thing I was talking about which was changed with Python 3.
And this is why one should not use @company.com email :)
