One of my first reactions to Swift was the following:
Reading up my stream, #swift should be driving millions of new users (cognitively speaking) to #groovy and #rust. Everybody wins?
— Isaka Traore (@itraor) June 3, 2014
In this post I elaborate a little more on the reasons that I held this belief, that everybody wins.
- Apple, obviously: legions of developers who might have been put off by Objective-C will now give a second look and many are likely to write code for Apple platforms.
- Groovy, Scala, Objective Caml programmer: programmers experienced with these languages can now leverage their skills to build solutions for the Apple platform without having to learn another language. Their main hurdle would be to get acquainted with iOS and OSX platform concepts and building blocks.
- Scala ecosystem: the introduction of Swift might have the side effect of actually making some people understand Scala better and quicker, this because it shares many concepts with Scala but has a more readable syntax
- A converse effect of the above bullet point: Apple developers who make the jump to Swift, would also realise the many benefits of functional programming and adopt languages like Groovy, Scala or Erlang.
Folks looking for new opportunities should find plenty. From a business opportunity perspective, here are some potentially profitable developments:
- Groovy backend for Clang and LLVM: this could make it possible to write native iOS and OSX code in Groovy. People used to writing web only code would suddenly be able to port their solutions to the Apple platform.
- Cross Training Developers: this could be the best time for Groovy or Scala training organisations to tap into the masses of iOS and OSX developers scrambling to learn functional programming. Why leave that money on the table?
- Apple and Pivotal work together: this is a bit tangential, but if Apple were interested in expanding their Cloud clout, this is a good way to do that because they suddenly would be able to target the data centre too! Just buy Pivotal and leapfrog both Microsoft and Google in one fell swoop!
I don’t see yet how Swift could benefit either Microsoft or Google ecosystems. If anything, this could be a blow to those ecosystems as Apple is suddenly more attractive to a rising generation of developers converting to functional programming.