Swift is not Ruby, Ruby is not Swift
There has been a lot of hubbub surrounding the introduction of the Swift programming language by Apple.
I find it interesting that many people feel that Swift is the death of RubyMotion, Xamarin, etc. It’s a strange reaction and a bit perplexing to me. Perhaps it’s something about the Apple developer community because they’ve been, basically, mono-language for so long, they assume that it’s normal.
Windows is written in C++, but you can write native Windows apps in many different programming languages. Unix is written in C, but I can happily program in C++, Fortran, Pascal, Lisp, etc.
In OS X, for native apps, you can now choose from Objective-C, Swift, RubyMotion, Xamarin/c#, c++, etc. This seems good, normal, and healthy.
I like Swift, but it’s less like Ruby and more like Scala. I personally prefer dynamic languages over statically-typed languages (I think static typing is premature optimization). I work in Vim, and prefer the command-line dev environment. So Swift isn’t for me, and Ruby isn’t for someone else. Mono-cultures tend to die. RubyMotion isn’t going to die, iOS isn’t going to die. That’s a good thing.
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