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from the swift-language-but-not-so-swift-name dept.
Apple surprised the audience at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday with a tool that few attendees expected: a new programming language for iOS and OS X development called Swift (https://developer.apple.com/swift/). There already is a programming language called Swift (http://swift-lang.org/main/) that was developed by the National Science Foundation, some other government agencies, and the University of Chicago for use in parallel computing applications. This isn't that. What it is, is an entirely new syntax that -- in the words of Apple senior VP Craig Federighi, who unveiled it during the Monday morning WWDC keynote -- aims to be "Objective-C without the baggage of C."
Some of that "baggage" will already be familiar to developers who cut their teeth on C but later moved on to scripting languages such as Python (and Federighi compared Swift to Python several times during his presentation). Like scripting languages but unlike C, Swift lets you get straight to the point. The single line println("Hello, world") is a complete program in Swift. Note, also, that you don't even have to end the statement with a semicolon, as you do in C. Those are optional, unless you're combining multiple statements on a single line; i.e. a semi-colon is a statement separator rather than a statement terminator.
In addition to its online documentation, Apple has released an e-book, The Swift Programming Language, that's a free download (https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-swift-programming-language/id881256329) from the iBooks Store. To start working with the language itself, you'll need to download the beta release of XCode 6 (https://developer.apple.com/xcode/downloads/), which includes tutorials to get you going.
(Score: 3, Informative) by meisterister on Tuesday June 03 2014, @04:55PM
Why don't they make a language that's like Objective-C but without the baggage of Objective-C?
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 03 2014, @08:40PM
why is this moderated flamebait?
I haven't used Objective-C myself, but everyone, that has, told me that Objective-C is annoying.
It should be moderated funny if not informative.
Also apropos moderation: Users should be able to keep moderation points much longer. It's so annoying to have them for such a short time. Because sometimes you find a comment that absolutely deserves moderation and then you just don't have them.
(Score: 2) by BasilBrush on Tuesday June 03 2014, @09:34PM
They have. For example the number one complaint of people new to Obj-C is the square bracket method calling convention. Swift uses the more conventional periods and parentheses.
However it does retain all the good stuff from Obj-C.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 3, Informative) by mrMagoo on Wednesday June 04 2014, @01:41AM
If you take Objective-C, and remove the C, you get SmallTalk.
I don't know how many folks noticed, but the chap that gave the Swift Demo is [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lattner]Chris Lattner[/url]. That's some fairly big juju.
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment." -Originally attributed to Nasrudin
(Score: 1) by mrMagoo on Wednesday June 04 2014, @01:43AM
I keep forgetting to not use BBCode...
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment." -Originally attributed to Nasrudin