I've been seeing a lot of tweets from people saying that Swift has basically killed RubyMotion, which is extremely far from the truth, and I'm going to explain why quickly and without much fuss, because people seem to just be saying it without thinking.

RubyMotion is a toolchain, not a syntax

The primary reason people are saying RubyMotion is dead is because Swift brings a new, and arguably much much better syntax than Objective-C. What it doesn't bring is rest of the big reasons we use RubyMotion.

Command Line Focused Toolchain - BYO Editor/IDE/Terminal It's a Ruby - Which means gems and shared code with your other Ruby projects The community behind it is now growing extremely fast and is an absolutely amazing and active community

RubyMotion is evolving

The other reason RubyMotion is still an amazing option is both Android coming soon, and the fact that it's a bootstrapped business with a goal and a big future, unrestricted by platforms.

Swift is Apple's creation, one that will get confused with the Swift parallel scripting language which they even mention at the bottom to help the confusion. As Apple's creation, it will be developed to serve their needs and their platforms only.

None of you actually know Swift

The reality is that life is going to go on for a while without any large portion of the App Stores containing apps written using Swift, because no one knows it so far except as much as these introductory books and guides tell us.

It's certainly not going to get used in any team projects just yet unless they're bleeding edge.

You're creating competition where there is none

The sad fact of all this, is the above doesn't matter at all, the problem is we're developers, and as developers we tend to be bigoted about our language likes and dislikes. Ruby and Ruby related things get extreme sides of both, über fans and ruby haters, that's fine, but before you bash on RubyMotion and immediately dismiss it now that Swift exists, and then announce to the world that it's dead (DHH joke in here somewhere), please remember something.

RubyMotion was created by an amazing and brilliant developer, who bootstrapped his business, granted amazing jobs to people that deserved it, built in a profitable and sustainable business model from day one, and provided the tools and means for developers all over the world to do something that was just out of reach for them before RubyMotion existed.

Bashing a language like Ruby, or Objective-C, is extremely different from bashing a product, team, and invested, supporting, community behind it.

Please stop trying to make lifeless programming languages compete, instead of accepting that they're all here to work as companions to one another, solving the jobs they're best at or supplying a way that a developer can complete a task in best.