Swift - Apple's innovative new programming language

Obj-C is an interesting beast. Having a C background really helped me learn the language (although I stopped writing Obj-C at iOS 5), but was always a brain-squeeze to switch from writing JS or Ruby to writing Obj-C. Messages, messages, messages. And memory management! Swift looks interesting, excited to see it in action.

Looks very interesting. My concern is that being Apple-only it will be slow to adapt to issues, but I *hope* that they've got experienced designers behind it (it seems they do) and that their internal team has been using it heavily. It's not ideal (a more widely used language allowing for some transfer of knowledge) but it looks a hell of a lot better than objective-C.

I have to agree with @alexheeton in that the dev cycle may be slower just due to it being Apple only. Looking forward to seeing what we can do with it, but also not looking for a new learning curve that slows down development.

@guygal @alexheeton @SacBookReviewer Objective C was pretty much Apple-only as well. Nothing really new here on that front

I haven't had time to dig in yet, but as a developer, I'll say that it looks like a far more modern, productive language than ObjC. In my opinion, ObjC is an awful Frankenlanguage that tries to combine C and Smalltalk. Moreover, the apple libraries are a weird mix of pre-ARC CF objects, NS objects, etc. Once developers get used to Swift, I suspect they'll be significantly faster and more productive. And that there will be fewer crashes in iOS apps. It certainly won't solve all problems, but it feels like a big step.

I'm am not sure that it will attract more developers, it's still an Apple-only language as Objective-C is/was;) I'm very exciting to see what the real-time dev features looks likes though. I agree with @dgould, it's a big step and I can wait to dig in!

Everyone who procrastinated learning Objective-C so far suddenly don't have to feel bad. Swiftly you can join the new kid in the programming block.

So excited about this. I think we'll see a break now in the app ecosystem, with a new class of developers and apps coming through. Languages don't necessarily make much difference to making a good app, but in this case Swift is an enabler: Swift is tied deeply to cocoa and cocoa touch, brings major performance and productivity boosts, and is the first real glimpse of where Apple is going next. Most objective-C devs I know are vey excited by this. New era.

I believe this and the CloudKit, Xcode Playground and other updates will bring in or at least make the platform less intimidating. As a Designer I'm pretty happy with these changes as it makes prototyping easier: Xcode gained Live Rendering - this tightens the iteration cycle by updating Interface Builder / Design Canvas as it would look when the app is actually run; it also allows setting example data, removing the need for actually implementing any data logic. It might not be immediately obvious but the massive Developer improvements are important for more than Developers. Swift is nice but don't forget about Services (CloudKit) and Tools (Xcode). …as an iOS developer I kinda liked ObjC, Swift seems familiar to me as a JS developer but not being as strict as ObjC I fear it has the potential of attracting worse developers and thus harming the platform experience with more crashes, unexpected behavior — something extensions and the new customizations options might also contribute to.

Is there any chance to run Swift on MCU like micro-python?