Notes about the first talk at do-ios

Daniel_Jalkut_-_Apple’s_big_new_language.md

Daniel Jalkut - Apple’s big new language

• Language is mostly used to communicate with people, painters use proper paint for the message and when talking you pick the language for the person. When programming it’s the same.
• Started at apple in ’94 (software quality) and saw many pushed from apple in terms of language.
• Mac wasn’t OOP then, just flat namespace of function calls. You would write in Pascal, seemed liked Apple wanted to push Pascal. You also used 68K Assembly, Mac was written with that internally.
• Daniel wrote the equivalent of TextEdit back in 94 as a test. He had to do it in Assembly so we had to learn assembly as wel. Looks very primitive, verbose and I’m not sure I understand any of it.
• Back then there actually was a competitive space for C compilers. Apple had their own and there were a bunch of others. You were actually able to write C to make Mac apps as well.
• Apple has pushed about 20 languages over the time. NewtonScript was pushed with the Apple Newton. That was their first try to jump into the mobile space, and they failed miserably. The : operator in NewtonScript sends a message to an object. In a way it’s similar to obj-c.
• Dylan, started as a language for the Newton but the Newton was to basic to deal with Dylan. At the time it was a very modern and advanced language. Fun fact: Bob Dylan has sued Apple over the name.
• Pre OS X people complained about the OS being not as advanced as other platforms. Which is why apple acquired Next. At that time (’96-’98), even when OS X was released Apple seemed to be pushing Java. People really thought Java was going to be the language. Which is when Daniel wanted out of the Assembly, old school department and work on OS X.
• When Daniel started working on OS X he got trained in Objective-C and was given posters with every Cocoa class. The poster was both in Java and Objective-C. Some time later Apple switched to Objective-C fully, Java apps were left hanging and Apple never solved bugs.
• Objective-C was very loose,you could create, define and manipulate objects at runtime. Making it a lot more flexible than Java.
• Apple still didn’t seem to be sure about their language. Some other languages they pushed: ** AppleScript (still supported today) ** Ruby & Python (bridges) <- Apple put them on the Mac so they were okay with that. ** JavaScript <- Apple shipped Dashcode, a JavaScript IDE. ** Objective-C 2.0 <- had properties, lots of improvements over 1.0. This was where it became clear that Apple really wanted to push Objective-C. ** Swift, this is supposed to be Apple’s next big language. People wanted Objective-C 3.0 but got Swift. Even Apple employees didn’t know about Swift. Just high managers and the Swift developers knew. It was funny, Apple said “All will be Swift”, all sessions were in Objective-C because even the people making the talks didn’t know about Swift back then.
• Daniel thinks people have adopted Swift well enough for Apple to be supporting it for quite a while. But considering Apple’s history it might very well be that in ten years people will joke about Swift. New programmers should probably learn Swift because it’s what Apple seems to consider the main thing. Objective-C still has a place so it’s no waste of time. Just learn Swift first and then learn Objective-C. It really comes down to using the correct language for the correct jobs. Knowing Objective-C can help you achieve things that you otherwise might not achieve.
• Question: What will happen when Swift goes open source and we can build our back-ends in Swift? ** The question really is, when will Swift be written in Swift. Right now Swift is written in C++. The language team has been a lot more transparent then ever before. Their showing people what their ambitions are. Apple wants this to be a system language but internally there’s probably people saying that it should just be an app language.
• Question: We’ve talked about the front-end, do you know anything about back end decisions? Or iTunes connect for example? ** Not sure, Apple has been using WebObjects but they’re probably moving away from that. WebObject was a Java thing but that’s not a thing anymore so it’s another kind of mixed messages kind of thing.