[conspire] Ruby, Python, Swift, and Languages

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2020, at 6:06 AM, Nick Moffitt wrote:
> Ruby's a nice language! I think it helped break a lot of ice that 
> Python later sailed through afterward, in terms of showing:
> 
> 1: That the old ALGOL-related iteration structures weren't cutting it 
> in the 21st century.  Whether we wanted cool message-passing tricks 
> from Smalltalk or sequence comprehension tricks from Haskell, we just 
> were getting tired of wrapping *everything* in 1960s-style loops.

Oh god yes.

> 2: That a novel mapping of MVC-style thinking into a 
> template/dispatch/ORM/action model of Web development was a pretty good 
> way forward.

Would you classify Django (in its current state) as being like that? It does seem to have inherited that, but I don't recall it being like that earlier along in its life cycle.

> 3: That the world was actually ready to start adopting dynamic 
> languages for serious stuff again.

I'm really happy to see where Swift is going, and how Apple was very careful to keep the essential structure of what apps were for the first four years and then tear it all up and release Swift UI to break all the Objective-C programmer brains. (It's not entirely ready for prime time in large complex projects, but it is seriously cool).

Some of the features I love about Swift.

* The IDGAF placeholder in things like case statements: https://stackoverflow.com/a/25280179/10023193
* Opaque return types. I'll let Paul explain it. https://www.hackingwithswift.com/articles/187/how-to-use-opaque-return-types-in-swift-5-1

The other features I love are really more UI-specific and not really applicable to things like linux, so I'll leave them off the list except to say I love the reactive nature of SwiftUI.

Deirdre