While I have no opinion on the rest of the items in this list — Kotlin and Elm do indeed look interesting — I wouldn't really agree with Swift's potential viability. My experience with the language has been that it does many things badly, precious little well (compared to dozens of similar languages), and it isn't portable enough to be viable (it's basically Apple-only); those factors kill its chances right out of the gate. In fact, last I checked, Swift's popularity was dropping off sharply even among its own user base.
XCode doesn't help it - I've never had any other IDE crash, behave erratically, or outright delete work as frequently as that one did. My poor mentees spend half their time fighting (the latest version of) XCode.
Part of that isn't Swift's fault, mind you. Maybe there's a potentially good language somewhere under there, but there really isn't any viable technical justification for writing software in any platform-bound language when there are dozens of options for implementing the same portably.
Sorry if I'm being a wet blanket. I just don't see Swift as a worthwhile use of valuable learning bandwidth. That particular language has all the hallmarks of legacy-only in the making; ten years from now will find any Swift-only developers scrambling to learn a language that jobs exist for. (And I rarely dare say that about any language!)
While I have no opinion on the rest of the items in this list — Kotlin and Elm do indeed look interesting — I wouldn't really agree with Swift's potential viability. My experience with the language has been that it does many things badly, precious little well (compared to dozens of similar languages), and it isn't portable enough to be viable (it's basically Apple-only); those factors kill its chances right out of the gate. In fact, last I checked, Swift's popularity was dropping off sharply even among its own user base.
XCode doesn't help it - I've never had any other IDE crash, behave erratically, or outright delete work as frequently as that one did. My poor mentees spend half their time fighting (the latest version of) XCode.
Part of that isn't Swift's fault, mind you. Maybe there's a potentially good language somewhere under there, but there really isn't any viable technical justification for writing software in any platform-bound language when there are dozens of options for implementing the same portably.
Sorry if I'm being a wet blanket. I just don't see Swift as a worthwhile use of valuable learning bandwidth. That particular language has all the hallmarks of legacy-only in the making; ten years from now will find any Swift-only developers scrambling to learn a language that jobs exist for. (And I rarely dare say that about any language!)
Cool feedback, Jason.
I'll take your word for it, because I'm far from being an expert at Swift :)