One of the key announcements at Apple’s WWDC 2014 developer event was Swift, a new programming language. Whatever the technical merits of the approach, it continues an ignoble Apple tradition of grabbing names that are already in use in the tech space.
Before Apple came along, Swift was the name of at least four other projects in the technology space:
- The storage component of OpenStack
- An XMPP-compliant messaging client
- A parallel scripting language (though this isn’t widely used)
- The ARM-7 core in the Apple A6 and A6X chip (I’m guessing this might be where the idea came from)
Apple has plenty of form in this area. When it launched the original iPhone, Cisco owned the trademark on that name. Apple also was involved in a brief battle over the name iCloud. It even tried to trademark the word startup in Australia.
Comments
7 responses to “Apple’s New Swift Development Language Is Going To Cause Some Confusion”
As someone who uses the Swift scripting language in medical imaging, I don’t find this confusing at all. My small brain manages (will manage) to keep the two things separate.
Yeah, the only thing I find remarkable in this article is that Apple tried to trademark the word “startup” which is pretty shithouse. Other than that, meh!
Cisco also have the IOS trademark, although Apple did license the name from them prior to launching it.
I have the strangest feeling they’ve optimised this language to (explicitly) run on other phone devices
None of those four projects could even vaguely be confused with an iOS SDK by even the most dimwitted.
I honestly don’t see any way that it ‘is going to cause some confusion’.
How about some details about Swift rather than yet another non-article?
What about the biggest, most common use of SWIFT … banking transactions. SWIFT has been around since the 1970s and used everywhere for financial transactions.
These name double ups are fine until you try and google a problem you need to fix.
I think there is a pretty decent distinction and don’t think too much confusion will be caused.
Btw If anyone’s trying to learn Swift, check out http://www.LearnSwift.tips for a bunch of tutorial, code samples, etc.