'Swift' Programming Language in Development for Four Years, "Major Focus" Since 2013

[HMI]

That's pretty much how swifts fly, though, in real life. They're swiftest when they're swooping down, generally to snatch bugs out of the air, then they rise again and lose speed. The split tail is for extra maneuverability. Somebody at Apple is a birdwatcher .

Ok, I didn't know that! Thanks!

I'm not a birdwatcher! I usually just clump all birds together in the simplistic category called "Birds."
I do the same with "Trees," "Bushes," "Plants," and other things that I have no huge, overwhelming desire to learn more about.

I would just say, "Hey, that's a cool looking bird," and go on about my day.
But, I had no idea that "cool, swooping, dropping" thing was called a "Swift."

Good to know!

Nahhh .... Here ya go:
Image

Now, that's much better! Thank you!
My inner artist is pleased!!!

 

[sexiewasd]

Objective-c has always been a burden coming mostly from a background of scripting languages like Java and php. It's been very restrictive and taken away a lot of The fun. Swift looks incredible.

 

[wilhoitm]

I am glad to finally see Swift on the front page! LOL! It should have been on the front page right after the Keynote!

 

[liavman]

Where you see issue, I see opportunity. I'm picking this up as quickly as possible and hoping to whip off a much more friendly book. The book Apple offers starts off with a well organized tutorial for people who already know 5+ languages, but then it goes into the nitty gritties in an almost random order. At no point is the book suitable for someone who doesn't know at least one programming language, and rarely is it suitable for people who don't know several programming languages.

Swift For Dummies by ArtOfWarefare, 0.99

You can sell it for 9.99 on iBook store. Go for it.

 

[neutrino23]

Today's programmers have it easy.

We programmers from the 80s used to have to build linked lists from dirt and bits of string we found on the ground.

The programmers from the 70s had to punch their code out on cards and feed the cards into the machine.

Inferred variable types...pshaw.

Amen to that. Everything we used to do was like sand painting. Every single dot had to to be hand crafted. I say this just to emphasize how remarkable something like Swift is.

To put it in hardware terms, the first computer I worked with was built out of 7400 logic, just a step above individual transistors.

We didn't get flying cars but we did get iPhones, iPads and Swift.

 

[mrxak]

I am glad to finally see Swift on the front page! LOL! It should have been on the front page right after the Keynote!

I agree. It was really the biggest news at WWDC by far, and the potential implications are huge. I think a lot of tech sites don't really know what to make of it, because the people who run tech sites are editors and writers, not programmers. They can't really delve into the guts of a new programming language, and communicate about it in a way that's useful to programmers. So it gets a brief blurb in some dark corner of their websites. It's not really their fault, but I'm glad MacRumors at least has woken up to how big a deal this is.

Very much looking forward to more detailed write-ups on sites like Ars Technica in the future, where they actually have the expertise.

Anyway, I just watched the Introduction to Swift video on the dev site. It looks like it's also in the WWDC app as well. It was a pretty good overview of some of the basics, but I'm hoping Intermediate Swift pops up there soon as that session was today. Tomorrow there will also be an Advanced Swift session.

----------

We didn't get flying cars but we did get iPhones, iPads and Swift.

Somebody's never heard of Terrafugia .

 

[MattInOz]

So what are the chances/possibilities this language makes it beyond apple products? It would be great if it could be cross platform.

On the face of it you would say there is more commercial value for Apple to open it up than to keep it closed. Apple tends to be involved in open projects that are fairly low level like the LLVM compiler project. Which this seems to be an extension of anyway.

At a guess I'd say maybe it'll become a working sub-project of LLVM down the track, possibly after Xcode 6 goes out of Beta.

 

[tardegrade]

Today's programmers have it easy.

We programmers from the 80s used to have to build linked lists from dirt and bits of string we found on the ground.

The programmers from the 70s had to punch their code out on cards and feed the cards into the machine.

Inferred variable types...pshaw.

This ZX Spectrum, Machine Coder from 1983 agrees with you.

 

[AdonisSMU]

I agree. It was really the biggest news at WWDC by far, and the potential implications are huge. I think a lot of tech sites don't really know what to make of it, because the people who run tech sites are editors and writers, not programmers. They can't really delve into the guts of a new programming language, and communicate about it in a way that's useful to programmers. So it gets a brief blurb in some dark corner of their websites. It's not really their fault, but I'm glad MacRumors at least has woken up to how big a deal this is.

Very much looking forward to more detailed write-ups on sites like Ars Technica in the future, where they actually have the expertise.

Anyway, I just watched the Introduction to Swift video on the dev site. It looks like it's also in the WWDC app as well. It was a pretty good overview of some of the basics, but I'm hoping Intermediate Swift pops up there soon as that session was today. Tomorrow there will also be an Advanced Swift session.

----------



Somebody's never heard of Terrafugia .

Good to know. I am checking the vids now... Thx.

 

[cclloyd]

On the face of it you would say there is more commercial value for Apple to open it up than to keep it closed. Apple tends to be involved in open projects that are fairly low level like the LLVM compiler project. Which this seems to be an extension of anyway.

At a guess I'd say maybe it'll become a working sub-project of LLVM down the track, possibly after Xcode 6 goes out of Beta.

That's a piece of my question too. This looks interesting but businesses pretty much need to see beyond only iOS (I know, I know… sacrilege. Nevertheless) for those who would need to create an app to run in both iOS and Android, what's the ideal language that will allow as much code as possible to be used for both?

Again, I know here there's great hate for Android. But I don't need 50 posts of "what's the point?" Any business wanting to deliver something via apps needs to address both iOS and Android users. So if someone was polishing off some old C, C++ foundational skills and wanting to get back into coding so they could develop a same/very similar app experience for both platforms, what language is best for that?

If they could get past patent issues (if any), they could probably partner with Oracle, Google, or someone to make a compiler for other platforms, both mobile and desktop. Could start a golden age of coding (shortly after the end of the golden age of web standards), but that's probably just a dream

 

[lolkthxbai]

Has anyone else been trying to pick this up? I'm finding the lack of any real documentation a bit of an issue.

Have you checked out the documentation on iBooks?

Nevermind, just read your last post...

 

[Musocat]

Today's programmers have it easy.

...
The programmers from the 70s had to punch their code out on cards and feed the cards into the machine.
...

Yup. You could always tell the CS majors 'cuz we usually had a bunch of rubber bands on our wrists for holding our job decks together...

 

[asiga]

For what platforms can you develop in Swift? I'm asking this because I suspect this is just another battle in the war between Apple and Google. Google removed OpenCL support from their devices, claiming it wasn't a good API, and proposing Google proprietary APIs as the best invention in the world since butter cookies. And Apple replied by proposing Metal as better than OpenGL, and now this Swift language. Every new dev stuff is proprietary. Drop standards, go proprietary.

Sorry but I'm seeing most of the WWDC 2014 keynote as just following the Google strategy: favor proprietary dev technology over standard tools, try to make it difficult to write multiplatform apps, and win at any cost the war of having more apps than the rest.

I don't jump into that, because a good software takes years and years to be developed and polished, and tends to survive the initial platform they were developed for. Most of my code has been migrated from some platforms to newer ones when the older ones were abandoned or their companies died.

It's sad this war between Google and Apple. It makes me consider going to Linux or BSD, where standards are always the trend (well, except for the weird experiments in Ubuntu, agreed).

 

[wilhoitm]

Guys, I hate to say it but don't waste our time here with incomplete and inaccurate information... If you are not a Developer you are only getting about 5% to 7% of what Swift is.... And no, the good stuff is not in the iBook! Just sign up as a Developer and stop speculating! Oh, and the Playgrounds are not a gimmick! There are some really smart people behind Swift and its technologies, including a lot of Ph. Ds and Academics. If you don't have a degree in Computer Science you probably can't understand the significance of what is coming! I don't know what is worst. You guys or the Wall Street Analysts! LOL!

 

[zipa]

Today's programmers have it easy.

We programmers from the 80s used to have to build linked lists from dirt and bits of string we found on the ground.

The programmers from the 70s had to punch their code out on cards and feed the cards into the machine.

Inferred variable types...pshaw.

I remember having to code by just having '0's and '1's. And sometimes we would run out of the '1's so we had to carry on with just '0's.

 

[Michael CM1]

Haven't looked at a piece of code in 6 years (took C++ and C in college), but this almost makes me want to learn another programing language. It would be pretty cool to a) learn something that seems so fun/simple b) be at the beginning of the learning curve c) actually try and make some fun apps for my iPhone as a hobby

I tried to be a programmer twice in college with C and maybe C++. I then took a job where part of it was developing a website using HTML, CSS and Django. It all became confusing to me. I hate that because I got a lot of the concepts about how to implement something, but the actual code just drove me nuts at times. But then figuring out how to do something on a website thousands of people see daily that maybe 100 of which might even understand is kind of a rush.

I'm hoping to give it another try with this. I have simple app ideas, but when I looked at Xcode before the Objective C barrier was kinda huge. I don't know how simplified Swift is, but the first few pages I read about it are promising.

 

[MuppetGate]

I skimmed through the documentation on Swift (after I downloaded an ePub reader so I could even open it ),

You're mad because you had to download an ePub reader to read an ePub document.

Okay.

and it has some nice features like the whole "table?.objectAtIndex?.count" notation and the new switch features, but I don't really see the advantage of it over just adding new features to Objective-C.

Because bolting on feature after feature to a language that was never designed to handle them will turn that language into an unwieldy mess. At some point, you need to throw it out and start from fresh.
Secondly, bolting on feature after feature would not fix the biggest fundamental problem with ObjectiveC: fresh developers and enterprises don't like it. It's old-fashioned and a little bit clunky.

And how long before they dump Swift for something else?

Dunno, fifteen years maybe? Or shorter if there's a new breakthrough that makes development faster and safer. I wouldn't have it any other way, personally. And I wouldn't employ a developer who wasn't willing to learn new tools and techniques.

The main thing that messes with me is the lack of data types.

Okay, did you read the manual that it pained you so much to download?

Swift is a strongly-typed language that supports type inference. No one said it lacked data types.

Is it because people are too lazy to type "int i" instead of just "i"? It seems more confusing that way, too.

Developers have been using type inference for years; it's nothing new or scary to most people. Why should I type

let name: String = "Hello world"

when I can tell just by looking at the line that name is a string:

let name = "Hello world"

Having said that, I tend to use it for strings, not numbers.

I know C can be cumbersome sometimes, but certain things should work the same forever.

Then be happy; C will work the same forever – it's just that Apple has decided to move to something better for its up-and-coming developers.

The ObjectiveC market will wither as us old-timers retire and die off; I glad to see they've got a succession plan in place.

 

[kevinthebright]

as if

Looks like a project started by Scott Forestall

he had the mental firepower...touched by forestall, cursed forever

 

[kevinthebright]

Amen to that. ...

We didn't get flying cars but we did get iPhones, iPads and Swift.

Not yet. Give Elon a couple more years...

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Not knowing any programming languages, it is tempting to start with this.
It's generally much easier to start learning something intensely technical when that thing is new and at its simplest, and then grow and keep up with it as time goes on, rather than having to learn later on when it's had years of additions and exceptions piled on, which you also need to make sense of simultanously.

But I have no idea what I'm in for.
Is this the kind of thing a noob can learn on its own? Or should a person really learn some other languages first and then move into this?

Looking into the Apple dev program...

 

[gadgetgirl85]

Not knowing any programming languages, it is tempting to start with this.
?

I'm in the same boat.

 

[wilhoitm]

I'm in the same boat.

I would start with Swift! Also, it is not just the language but the Integrated Development Environment (Xcode 6) that gives you hints and automatic code completion! Xcode 6 has made it so it writes a lot of the code for you with Disney type graphical Storyboards that you link together with arrows and code segments!

 

[steve-p]

The problem I have with investing a lot of time in Swift is that it's proprietary and therefore not multiplatform. While it's certainly possible to have a career developing for Apple products only, it's not where I'm coming from as a long time C++/Java/PHP/Javascript/etc lead developer working in areas where plaforms are sometimes but often not Apple-based, and not always in the control of the developer. So while I will play with it as an academic exercise, and it looks like an elegant language with many good features inspired by other languages, I'm not sure that if I were just starting out in programming as a career I would bet the farm on focussing on Swift rather than other more portable languages. In general, proprietary is not always a good thing in IT.

 

[mrxak]

Good to know. I am checking the vids now... Thx.

Intermediate Swift is now up, so are two videos for those Objective-C mix-and-matchers, Integrating Swift with Objective-C and Swift Interoperability in Depth.

 

[Vidd]

As someone who built a PC just a couple of months ago after ~7 years of Macs, this is the one bit of the keynote that made me feel just a little bad about switching.

Seems lovely, but as someone who does Android development for my job and uses cross-platform tools in my own time, I don't think I'll get much of a chance to use it.