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0 pointsmunmaek6y ago0 comments

> With any luck, all will be footnotes in ten years.

Java and C# are not going anywhere, especially now that .NET works on OSX and Linux. Swift, unlikely. Go, still uncertain.

It's fairly short-sighted to criticize a language and hope it dies out in usage just because a corporation is chiefly responsible for it.

[0]: https://dotnetfoundation.org/about

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Illniyar6y ago

Swift has garnered little traction outside iOS development, while other languages are gaining traction inside iOS development (javascript mostly, but Kotlin is also trying to make headway into iOS development).

I won't put survival rating for it to be very big. I'm sure Apple would keep it for decades to come, but I'm wouldn't bet on it being anywhere near as popular as it is now in the future.

wk06y ago

IBM seems to be using swift on the server [1], probably most notably with their Kitura web framework [2].

TensorFlow also has a Swift API in development [3]. The people at FastAI seem quite excited about it [4].

[1] https://developer.ibm.com/swift/

[2] https://github.com/IBM-Swift/Kitura

[3] https://www.tensorflow.org/swift/api_docs

[4] https://www.fast.ai/2019/03/06/fastai-swift/

munmaekOP6y ago

As long those languages aren't native, they won't be nearly as popular as swift. Swift doesn't need to be adopted outside of iOS development at all, because when people develop iOS apps the main choice will be Swift.

Swift is actually a very pleasant language, and apple provides some pretty good documentation although it could be better.

It's going to play out like this: Swift or Objective-C (for legacy codebases/people who already experts in objective-c and don't want to switch), and some other, slower languages that will always be second class.

cesarb6y ago

> Swift doesn't need to be adopted outside of iOS development at all, because when people develop iOS apps the main choice will be Swift.

That would mean its fate would be tied to iOS, which is used only on phones built by a single company. When that company stopped producing mobile phones, or decided to use a different operating system, the language would die.

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koffiezet6y ago

> Go, still uncertain

A lot of the tools in the modern ops ecosystem are written in Go, and that trend is not slowing down. Not even going to start to list them. A lot of devs also love Go and it has a very nice community. If you would have said this 5 years ago? Sure - but now it's past the 10y mark in age - I think it's safe to say Go isn't going to go away any time soon.

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