Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
6 days ago
I think Swift was developed to keep a number of constituencies happy.
You can do classic OOP, FP, Protocol-Oriented Programming, etc., or mix them all (like I do).
A lot of purists get salty that it doesn’t force implementation of their choice, but I’m actually fine with it. I tend to have a “chimeric” approach, so it suits me.
Been using it since 2014 (the day it was announced). I enjoy it.
No Swift was developed as a strategic moat around Apple's devices. They cannot be dependent on any other party for the main language that runs on their hardware. Controlling your own destiny full stack means having your own language.
Apple already had that "strategic moat" with Objective-C. It was already a language you could effectively only use on Apple platforms (the runtime and the standard library only run on Darwin) and for which Apple controlled the compiler (they have their own fork of Clang).
I suspect that it was developed, in order to make native development more accessible. SwiftUI is also doing that.
They want native, partly as a “moat,” but also as a driver for hardware and services sales. They don’t want folks shrugging and saying “It doesn’t matter what you buy; they’re all the same.”
I hear exactly that, with regard to many hybrid apps.