Apple making sparse use of Swift in its own apps, engineer claims The Calculator app is the only part of iOS 9.2 that includes any Swift code, Ryan Olson noted in a blog post. It is at least said to be nearly "pure" Swift, with only two of 22 classes written in Apple's previous favorite language, Objective-C.

An immature language with no stable ABI? What's not to love? This language is for novices. One day, it will be for engineers.

Just to be clear, it's not the only new language with problems. I abandoned my experiments with Scala after I discovered the compiler couldn't parse a very simple and valid operator overloading construct. I'm sure there is someone out there who is excited to debug the compiler of a new language. My priorities lie elsewhere.

Labels: scala, swift

A programmer's view of Apple's new Swift language | VentureBeat | Dev | by Richard Byrne Reilly
Objective-C is great and really powerful. It has served Apple well for a really long time. It’s older than the web though. It is pretty awkward to learn – especially for someone new to programming.

No real plans to change to Swift here, but Metal is definitely on the whiteboard. Of course, at same time, love them tuples and other innovative new language features (Yay! I watched the Advanced Swift WWDC talk). And I will much enjoy watching new programmers getting very confused over the difference between structs and classes.

I will use Swift for small tasks. Although I suppose if I'm going to learn a new language it might as well be C#. That mono runtime is really slutty.

Although I do think there are some merits to eliminating header files (Modula-2 "Interface"), I think it would be good to have an option. Really the last thing I want to do when studying a module's interface is read implementation details.

Labels: security, swift

A programmer's view of Apple's new Swift language | VentureBeat | Gadgets | by Richard Byrne Reilly: "Swift pulls a lot from various lanagues. There’s a lot that reminds me of JavaScript, Go, Ruby, and others. Objective-C is pretty old. It’s a really welcome change to see lots of features inspired by modern languages."

Of course, I'm no expert, but Swift looks more like Scala to me than any other language I've been exposed to.

Labels: scala, swift

Apple unveils Swift, a brand new Xcode programming language for developers: "In a demonstration, Apple showed off the 'Swift Playground,' where developers write code and how results are displayed as soon as code is written. Apple says Swift was designed from the ground up for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. Swift can be used for basic apps, like social networking, or advanced 3D games using the new 'Metal' graphics optimization. And because it operates alongside Objective-C, developers will be able to seamlessly interchange languages."

Looking forward to Swift and Metal. Together or individually.

Labels: metal, swift, wwdc