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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, Interesting) by forsythe on Tuesday June 03 2014, @10:12PM
I'm not really so interested in what I can do with formatting, or how pretty my code looks (within reason). I'll adapt. I'm interested in the wonderful, subtle bugs that other programmers can create, then leave for me to encounter. If optional semicolons leads to rules that require people to write blog posts like this [benalman.com] to illustrate them, that's rather counterproductive to the notion of `cleaner code'.
Of course, if they're done well, and no unintuitive behavior of any sort arises, then good for Apple. But somehow I doubt that.
(Score: 3, Informative) by BasilBrush on Tuesday June 03 2014, @10:28PM
I'm not a Javascript user, so I can't comment on semi-colon use there. However I do recall reading that Javascript was originally hacked together in about 4 days by one person. So maybe that explains the lack of rationality there.
Swift on the other hand has been in development at Apple for 4 years, before any public release, including major use by their developer tools team. If there were ambiguities introduced by optional semicolons I would expect they'd have spotted them by now, and made semicolons mandatory again.
There's been plenty of other languages that didn't need semi-colon terminators. It's hardly an impossible task.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!