Swift Knowledge Quickly Becoming One of the Most In-Demand Skills for Freelance Developers

[pmacro]

Why would they? Google has Go and they already support a bunch of more popular third party languages, e.g. C, Java and Python. Swift doesn't bring anything new to the table.

C isn't safe, Java has performance issues, and both lack many of the "modern" features that swift has, such as first class functions, built in compiler knowledge of optionals etc. I don't know about Go and Python, but they need to replace Java with something rather than using an old language that a rival company has control over.

 

[Krevnik]

I personally had a really hard time learning Swift and I hated optionals, but after being forced to work in C# for awhile, optionals (and many other things) in Swift suddenly made sense. Now I like them.

Being able to specify parameters as optional or non optional is a huge code saver, too. You want to try to pass nil in to my function that requires the parameter? Compiler catches that crap instead of forcing the function to error check every little thing at runtime, so less code, more safety from crashes and implicit assumptions. And I don't feel like you want to lean on "you can pass messages to nil" behavior from Obj-C either.

Helps that newer versions of AppKit and UIKit are getting better annotations so not everything is being marked as explicitly unwrapped optionals too.

And honestly, the type system is one the better ones I've used. I'm finding it a lot easier to build out more tricky and complicated relationships while maintaining unit testability using Protocol Oriented Programming in Swift than I've been able to do in Obj-C or C++. C# can get close, but yeah, it has some annoying gaps in how it handles things.

 

[nextuser]

Apparently someone is paying for people that do know Swift so regardless of it being hype or anything else the money is flowing and also its the language supported by Apple for all of its platforms so I doubt it'll die although it might become a niche used only for Apples platforms (thats the case of Objective-C anyway) and IBM is also spending money on Swift for the server.

So either IBM, Apple and everyone else spending money on it are stupid and you're incredibly smart or the other way around, the future will tell which is which.

Just because someone is spending money on it doesn't make it a good language. Just look at PHP, Java, etc. Java was specifically designed to make mediocre programmers somewhat productive and to make expert programmers mediocre.

 

[adib]

I can attest to its popularity. I picked up the language when it was still in its 1.0 phase, in the evenings of my day job as a Python/C++ developer. Put my resume online and within two months, had a client. Now I'm freelancing fulltime and almost every week, a recruiter asks me if I'm available for a project.

Right now it's a good business.

Where do you put your resume for freelancing ?

 

[bartvk]

Where do you put your resume for freelancing ?

I just mailed them to a dozen or so recruitment agencies.