Comment by flohofwoe
2 years ago
Can Swift really be called a success when it's only being used in the very narrow niche (the Apple software ecosystem - and only because it's essentially dicated by the platform owner)?
2 years ago
Can Swift really be called a success when it's only being used in the very narrow niche (the Apple software ecosystem - and only because it's essentially dicated by the platform owner)?
Yes, that is how languages become a success on the market, either being pushed by the platform owner no matter what, or by having a framework written in them that everyone feels like using.
Everything else are aspiring extras in the cinema of programing languages, waiting on the sidelines for that major role that will come someday, it really will, one just has to believe enough.
Counter-example: Kotlin.
Not at all, given the way Google is pushing it on Android, they are even mischievous enough to compare Kotlin with Java 6 when going on about why Kotlin.
For all practical purposes ART has turned into the Kotlin Virtual Machine.
However it so happens, that to keep the advantage of using Java libraries in the Android ecosystem, they actually need to support newer Java libraries unless they feel like rewriting all of them into Kotlin.
So Android 12 and 13 got a subset of Java 11 LTS, and Android 14 is getting Java 17 LTS support.
That doesn't change the reasoning that Android is all about Kotlin nowadays, unless one is writing platform code itself.
2 replies →
How is that a counter example? Doesn’t Kotlin fulfil a similar role for Android?
2 replies →
That's not a counter example:
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:720/format:webp/1*sojK...
Kotlin would be likely still nowhere without Google and Android.
Counterexample: python
Yeah, python filled an essential gap of a easy, high level language.