You have to love how IBM uses the old fashioned press releases to try and lure young developers to use their hip new technology on their platform.

They can't ever stop doing press releases of course, but the Bluemix marketing site has a bit nicer presentation of the interesting bits: http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/swift/

I don't disagree. Companies always need to issue press releases in conjunction with an announcement, but too many older companies (mine included) too often lean on them like a crutch.

If IBM wants to stay relevant, they need to start controlling how things like this are announced and branded. IBM actually has a cool set of offerings here, but it's obscured behind a collage of unfamiliar names like Bluemix, OpenWhisk, Kitura that belongs to a group called IBM MobileFirst Offering Management.

With a barrage of names like that, it reeks of a group that's going to be reshuffled and rebranded into something else 1-3 years from now.

People want one name and one comprehensive page. If you want to attract Swift developers to use Bluemix, then direct them to something like this: https://github.com/ibm-swift/kitura

Developers these days want one name that they can google, download the bits, and get started in under 5 minutes to see if it's something that's worth their while.

Can't say I understand the value in this at all.

Heroku for swift?

Sounds like an old business model with a new language.

Still, making the lumbering giant tread into the 21st century is not going to be without pain, I'm glad to see they are at least trying.

As a Java early adopter, I saw many jump to it thanks to IBM's adoption.

Assuming this might have a similar effect, Oracle should better speed up those value types and AOT compilation improvements.

Exact same thing as Node allowing people specialized in javascript to easily transition to the server.

There is nothing for me in it, there is nothing for you in it, but there is something in it for the swift developers (and thus, for IBM).

I transitioned from Python to Node and from Node onto the whole stack. I think a lot of people did this.

There are presumably still a lot of people that see benefit in being able to write one programming language across their whole stack.

Just like not everyone using node started as a frontend js dev who transitioned to server side, if Swift continues to mature on the server there will be people who use it who didn't start as iOS/Mac devs.

Presumably you don't program in swift.

One Language to rule them all ...

That'll probably never happen but Swift is rapidly gaining popularity. Over 3 dozen books were released within 18 months of Swift's announcement:

http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/books

And dozens of bloggers publish Swift articles every week:

http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?week=20160220