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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: 2) by BasilBrush on Tuesday June 03 2014, @08:57PM
Who said it uses duck typing? It's a type-safe language.
If you read the book, you'll find lots of new stuff.
One fantastic improvement over C is conditional values. When you declare a value of any type (not just what would be a pointer in C) you can make it conditional. This means that as well as all the normal values of that type, it can have no value (nil). If it's not conditional, it can't have the nil value.
This means that it is a definite fact both to the programmer and the compiler whether a particular value can have a nil value that must be considered. No need to guess, or check just in case as in C.
Furthermore, once you check that a value is not nil, you get an "unwrapped version" of that value which is not conditional, so you know that you don't again need to check it for nil.
And yes, it has a lighttable like IDE. No idea why you mentioned the completely different and obscure language of Clojure though.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 05 2014, @12:35PM
That's also not a terribly new concept. Yes, it's not there in C (not directly, at least; you can easily emulate it using a pointer, which given the low-level-nature of C is the right choice). But it has been in several functional languages for many years, has been implemented in Boost for quite some time (boost::optional), and is considered for inclusion in the next C++ standard.