Microsoft acquires Xamarin
It was bound to happen, and it finally did: Microsoft is acquiring Xamarin. It’s a good fit for the all-new, all-platform, mobile-and-cloud-first Microsoft, as the Xamarin IDE lets developers code in Microsoft’s flagship C# language on Windows and Mac OS and target Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS, and Windows Phone apps.
That’s pretty much all that either company are saying at the moment, other than they’ll talk more about it at Microsoft’s upcoming Build conference, and then again at Xamarin’s Evolve conference.
IBM releases Kitura, a Swift web framework and web server
It used to be that a programming language wasn’t real until it could be used to implement itself. These days, a programming language isn’t real until it’s been used to implement a web framework with RESTful routing and web services support, which means Swift just got real. IBM announced the Kitura web framework at Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona, and The Register was there to cover the announcement with their trademark snark.
It’s a pretty good follow-up to an earlier announcement about bringing Swift to the web/cloud with Bluemix.
Square’s writeup of Kotlin
If you were looking for a writeup of the developer experience with JetBrains’ newly-1.0-released language Kotlin, look no farther than the writeup produced by Square’s Jake Wharton. It was written in January 2015, but most of it is still applicable. I love the fact that at the end of the document, he asks people not to refer to it as “the Swift of Android”, but it’s just too useful and apt a phrase not to.