Damn, i just mastered Objective C - Swift however looks like a massive step up (has anyone tried Xcode 6 yet??)
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Apple Announces Significant SDK Improvements with New 'Swift' Programming Language, CloudKit and More
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If you are a registered developer you might want to watch the "Platforms State of the Union" video, I bet a summary of 60% what you need to know about Xcode 6 is in there! It looks like the video is up already. Looks like Apple is not playing around this year!
I am not sure that video is up but something it streaming to my iPad! It almost looks realtime but I doubt that?
OMG, it looks like the Sessions are streaming realtime as they are happening from my iPad to my AppleTV!
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Objective-C is just C with some extensions; if you are good with C and have good understanding of objects, learning Objective-C takes half and hour.
If you are new to programming, just start with Swift. You will pick it up much faster.
Swift is actually very interesting. It incorporates many high-level concepts from 'less popular' (but still very powerful languages) that go back to at least ML. I can see how it will help reduce both the development time and the possibility of an error. It is very nice to see such a high-level language to be adopted as a main development toolkit on OS X. I wonder though how efficient certain things are. Especially the overhead of the optional types worry me. I imagine they would be implemented with some sort of pointer tagging...
I was literally yelling like a b**ch, when I got to this while reading the guide
WWDC 14: boring... Ok... Where's the iwatch/Apple TV... Hey Tim Sweeney, ooh shiney... I hope they have more than this... Jaw on floor, wtf! BOOM HEADSHOT!
Full blown! And at first glance it looks like it is a mixture of Java, Ruby, C, C++, Python, and JavaScript and a few other languages. It looks extremely powerful and concise. I only had 4 hours of sleep so it is making my head hurt right now but I am loving what I see.
I am not sure if it is compiled or interpreted or both but it has realtime interactive output of UI and even of graphics so they must be doing something pretty interesting!
It also has all of the epic expressive language constructs like:
Closures unified with function pointers
Tuples and multiple return values
Generics
Fast and concise iteration over a range or collection
Structs that support methods, extensions, protocols.
Functional programming patterns, e.g.: map and filter
Exactly what I thought!
Apple, this is amazing, did not expect this AT ALL!
When will Xcode 6 be open to all?
I see that you must be part of the Dev Program to download Xcode 6 beta. When will it be available to registered users not part of the Dev program? Would like to start trying my hand at the Swift language
I see that you must be part of the Dev Program to download Xcode 6 beta. When will it be available to registered users not part of the Dev program? Would like to start trying my hand at the Swift language
Swift was the most important announcement today!
How come this is not on the front page?
This announcement didnt make front page because Swift is not important or revolutionary technology. Beats reducing bass on their headphones... now that is front page news!
Not a new programming language from Apple, which is the point that I made, but I guess you missed that.
I guess you weren't expecting a new iPhone at the last year's iPhone keynote, were you?
Wow, this is the most incredible WWDC I can remember.
Swift looks interesting. I'm not sure how Apple is positioning it - it seems to be geared for rapid deployment but since it's faster than Obj-C it can also be deployed in shipping code.
One very important point is something Apple mentioned in the Platforms State of the Union just now - the language is evolving based on user feedback so while they will guarantee binary compatibility, source compatibility is not guaranteed for now.
Just looking at the examples I saw during the presentations, it looks messy to me (particularly the function declaration syntax). Scripting languages always look messy to me. Objective-C is much more readable. As a developer, I really like control of my code - to know exactly what is happening. That's why I like C so much.
I suppose I'm having a hard time letting go. I think I will read up on Swift, use it for rapid prototyping in the Xcode Playgrounds, and then decide whether it will be my primary programming language based on that experience. For now I'm sticking with Objective-C.
Swift looks interesting. I'm not sure how Apple is positioning it - it seems to be geared for rapid deployment but since it's faster than Obj-C it can also be deployed in shipping code.
One very important point is something Apple mentioned in the Platforms State of the Union just now - the language is evolving based on user feedback so while they will guarantee binary compatibility, source compatibility is not guaranteed for now.
Just looking at the examples I saw during the presentations, it looks messy to me (particularly the function declaration syntax). Scripting languages always look messy to me. Objective-C is much more readable. As a developer, I really like control of my code - to know exactly what is happening. That's why I like C so much.
I suppose I'm having a hard time letting go. I think I will read up on Swift, use it for rapid prototyping in the Xcode Playgrounds, and then decide whether it will be my primary programming language based on that experience. For now I'm sticking with Objective-C.
This should be a front page breaking news. Apple changes programming languages once in 25 years, that's a huge thing.
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Probably with the public release of Yosemite.
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Probably with the public release of Yosemite.
So are you suggesting that you DID expect Apple to switch programming languages? That would be a very extraordinary guess that all of the top apple sites missed, you might be blessed.
THIS!!!!!! Not only are the concepts similar, Playgrounds actually looks almost identical to the concept of a futuristic IDE that Bret Victor (of worrydream.com) presented in his talk Inventing on Principle at the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference in 2012. Save for the Swift language that is. Check it out on Vimeo, the demo starts at the 2 min offset... A must-watch! Also, Bret Victor used to work at Apple according to his CV... I seriously doubt that's a coincidence? Btw, a totally insane CV
!So are you suggesting that you DID expect Apple to switch programming languages? That would be a very extraordinary guess that all of the top apple sites missed, you might be blessed.
Of course I wasn't expecting a whole new programming language today. But it's a developers confenerce, so I without a doubt expected some cool announcements that will shake the developers up. And boy Apple did exactly that. As a from-time-to-time-developer
)), I was literally amazed several times during the keynote. It was nowhere near boring even with no device announcements which I guess is the only reason of your buttz hurt.Of course I wasn't expecting a whole new programming language today. But it's a developers confenerce, so I without a doubt expected some cool announcements that will shake the developers up. And boy Apple did exactly that. As a from-time-to-time-developer
ok, I guess I didn't fully understand what you were saying, and I don't think that you really understood my first post. I wasn't really disappointed by no hardware announcements, just the general (user facing) changes to iOS and OS X (the first half of the keynote) were fairly bland compared to previous keynotes where the keynote speech as been more directed to the general public than to developers, with the rest of the conference directed at developers. The third section of the show was mind blowing, with swift being the most shocking. the look on the faces of the scholarship students was priceless.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, and thank you for responding with a well thought out post.
A proprietary single-platform language, no matter how nice, has a limited return on the investment needed to learn and become well-practiced.
Swift should be a standard, should be used for other purposes too and for heaven's sake, how hard would it be to repackage the iPhone4S internals as an OEM embedded module that runs a stripped down version of iOS?
Swift should be a standard, should be used for other purposes too and for heaven's sake, how hard would it be to repackage the iPhone4S internals as an OEM embedded module that runs a stripped down version of iOS?
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Am I the only one really hating the syntax of Swift? Its nearly as butt ugly as Perl or c++. I really hope I will not be forced to migrate to that sick joke.
I still think Metal is the sleeper of the two. Yes Swift will make development faster, Metal implemented on an AppleTV may just make it a decent gaming platform or at least an acceptable gaming platform even with last couple of AppleTV iterations.