Interested in learning about Swift, but not ready to commit to the entire iBook yet? Read the linked article. Well written, detailed, but just focusing on the highlights. But when you’re done, RTFM.
Highlights of Apple’s new Swift programming language
This appears to be written from the perspective of someone who doesn’t see the utility of the dynamic nature of Objective-C, and it doesn’t add much outside of the material in the WWDC Intro to Swift video (aside from insufferable complaints about the lack of Java-style string concatenation in ObjC — I suppose all the CS schools that teach Java as a first language are to blame for this).
Swift represents a complete turnaround from the dynamic behavior of Objective-C to a completely statically-typed language (?), and it would be interesting and educational to explore the actual language design tradeoffs Apple is making.
Statically typed languages aren’t less dynamic. I lived off ECMA languages for years (C#, Java and ActionScript) and wrote very dynamic code in all 3. It’s different in the approach but definitely not restrictive or less dynamic; just different.
Great write up. I am still chugging on the eBook but need an app to truly dig in.
I’m just happy to be done with obj-c’s sillyness, see strings and switch sections in the article. I’m really embracing Swift.
Swift looks (and acts) much more like more modern languages like Python, Perl and Ruby, vastly more so than Obj-C.
This is going to open up Mac and IOS programming to a hella larger pool of programmers.
I’m excited about Swift, but it seems kind of a jerk move to name your language with the same name as an existing language. Apple even has a link at the bottom of their page pointing to the other.
“Looking for the Swift parallel scripting language? Please visit http://swift-lang.org“
Surely, that’s going to wreak havoc with attempting to search for the one and not the other.
Well, if you ever create something, and you try to name it, you better be prepared to be a jerk, because there’s 7 billion of us, and we all keep naming things all the time.