Lanica

There are 7 posts filed in Lanica (this is page 1 of 1).

The Swift Language

 

codinginswiftpanelLast week, June 2nd, Apple announced a new programming language called Swift.

As I watched the Keynote, I turned to one of my colleagues and said something to the extent that Apple would introduce a new language and new graphic features. And I was right. It was about time for a new easier and more palatable language than Objective-C. Now Objective-C is not going anywhere. There is a ton of legacy code and if we have learned anything from the past, is, that if it works and it is shipping, there is no need, cough, cough, cough, to rewrite it. Swift is a very nascent language, there is a lot of excitement around it, I am excited about it, but Objective-C is not dead and will not be dead five years from now. It may not be Apple’s official language, but like C, the language will not just go poof and disappear.

Having said that, I saw, seen, and am experiencing the same level of enthusiasm as all of you who are currently knee deep in shit in swift. Love all the comparisons to every language out there, Rust, Erlang, C#, Go, Haskell, Javascript. Missing are Forth, Fortran, Cobol, C and C++. ( just kidding guys ).

And with that enthusiasm, I started a twitter channel for all things swift related, a facebook swift page, meetup group, and a forum. And I invite you to follow us on twitter, like us on facebook, join our meetup, and discuss swift language and other languages over at our forum.

Twitter : http://twitter.com/codinginswift

Facebook: http://facebook.com/codinginswift

Meetup: http://meetup.com/SWIFTProgramming

Forum: http://codinginswift.com

Thanks and expect all sorts of swift programming updates, tutorials, learning courses from me and my group of crazy die hard language fanatics from all sorts of language backgrounds.

Feel free to reach out at cicaza [at] carlosicaza [dot] com (you know the drill on emails). And if you want to help us in any way shape or form, by all means I welcome that.

And with that, go follow @codinginswift, like us on facebook and join our meetup, and ask away at our forum.

Carlos

We Really Don’t Know How To Compute!

Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic Professor of EE at MIT. Sussman is a coauthor (with Hal Abelson and Julie Sussman) of the MIT computer science textbook “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”. Sussman has had a number of important contributions to Artificial Intelligence, and with his former student, Guy L. Steele Jr., invented the Scheme programming language in 1975.

This presentation is a poignant realization of how we really don’t know how to compute, and my two favorite gems are, programs are not modifiable going forward and that the real problem in computing is the evolving and maintenance cost are becoming increasingly expensive.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To-Compute

“An offer I couldn’t refuse.”

A first-hand, mildly amusing account of the Lanica Game Platform and background on the Lanica/Appcelerator partnership.

Click the behind the scenes interview picture below for the full video!

Carlos Icaza Interview

• Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie (@JHaynie)
• Lanica CEO Carlos Icaza (@CarlosIcaza)
• PlayViews CTO James Young (@JamesYoung)
• Digitalvaliance CEO Ismail Maiyegun (@Maiyegun)
• ArdentKid founder Omid Ahourai (@ArdentKid)

Lanica 2.0 Launches

That should give you all a clue as to why I have been missing for the last couple of months.

Well, Lanica 2.0 launches without much fanfare, mostly, to work out the kinks, and what nots of our new website and new product offerings which will be coming on line slowly.

But goes without saying, you can download Platino and take it for a 45 trial run. ( Yes, I heard that 45 days isn’t enough.. and I know….)

We hope to have the Lanica Game Platform ready as soon as possible, and with your feedback, allow us to create the de-facto standard in game development.

We are far from perfect and I know there are a lot of questions, quirks, fallacies, missing diagrams, broken links, etc, we are working on all the issues and listening to you closely as to what works, doesn’t work, etc.

Remember, that our ultimate goal is your success, with your success, comes our success.

Thank you and please visit http://www.lanica.co and let me know what you think.

Carlos.

Carlos’ Ten Commandments for Entrepreneurs

For a number of years I have been invited to give a series of talks at Florida International University’s School of Computing and Information Sciences and at the University of Miami’s College of Engineering. Both schools asked me to elaborate on my experiences as a software engineer at a Fortune 500 company and about what it’s like to start a company in Silicon Valley.

This past Tuesday, (November 2nd) I was invited to FIU to chat about what I thought was going to be about the challenges of going mobile and how Ansca — with its Corona SDK — solved the problem of platform fragmentation with iOS and Android devices. With FIU being far removed from Silicon Valley, I figured the students would benefit not only from listening to my “pitch” about Corona, (salesman hat on!) but also about the mobile landscape, in general.

To my surprise, FIU, announced the event under “Entrepreneurship” and the title of the session was Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. Usually, the sessions last about an hour: a 30-minute talk and 30-minute Q&A. Curiously enough, the session on Tuesday went on for almost three hours! We started at 6:30pm, and I answered the last Q&A question around 9:40, as the maintanence workers were about to lock up.

Unfortunately, nobody had an SD card big enough to record the entire 3-hour session. But luckily, I had done a presentation on entrepreneurship before where I shared my experiences as an entrepreneur — from having an idea to closing $1.5 million in Series A funding from Merus Capital.