Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Swift Community Podcast

Episode 1 (tweet):

Welcome to the Swift Community Podcast — a podcast for the Swift community, by the Swift community. On this initial episode, John Sundell, Garric Nahapetian and Chris Lattner introduce the concept of the show and why it was created — and recount their first impressions of Swift and the evolution of the community, starting with Chris’ initial prototype back in 2010.

Update (2019-02-18): Ole Begemann:

This is a transcript (edited for readability) of the parts I found most interesting. You’ll see I mainly quoted Chris Lattner because I think his account of how Swift was created is the most relevant to preserve for posterity.

[…]

John Sundell: And then he brought you out, right? That was the classic line: the “Objective-C without the C”.

Chris Lattner: Which honestly I have mixed feelings about, because that’s really not what it’s about.

John Sundell: It’s a good tagline.

Chris Lattner: It was the right thing to say to the community at the time.

[…]

Chris Lattner: The reason it is conflicting to me is that from the beginning of the project, my goal was to build a full-stack system. It was to look at all the existing systems out there, see what’s good or bad about each of them, and then cherry-pick the best ideas from systems wherever they come from. And the goal was really to build something that you could write firmware in or that you could do scripting in, that you could write mobile apps or server apps or low-level systems code, and have it be great at all of those, not just some terrible compromise.

So that positioning was absolutely the right thing to do [at the time]. But hopefully, Swift will grow over time in kinds of what it is able to do.

Previously:

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