Swift was one of the biggest surprises at WWDC 2014. It was started roughly 4 years ago as one of several explorations into what would replace Apple's venerable Object-C language. Swift was spearheaded by Chris Lattner, head of Apple's developer tools department, who also lead LLVM (lower level virtual machine) and Clang. Lattner shared on his site, nondot:
I started work on the Swift Programming Language (wikipedia) in July of 2010. I implemented much of the basic language structure, with only a few people knowing of its existence. A few other (amazing) people started contributing in earnest late in 2011, and it became a major focus for the Apple Developer Tools group in July 2013.
The Swift language is the product of tireless effort from a team of language experts, documentation gurus, compiler optimization ninjas, and an incredibly important internal dogfooding group who provided feedback to help refine and battle-test ideas. Of course, it also greatly benefited from the experiences hard-won by many other languages in the field, drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list.
Lattner also, briefly, discusses Playground, the interactive programming environment in Xcode. It's only just been introduced and thousands if not millions of people will soon be hitting it full speed and full force and there's not QA (quality assurance) in the world better than that. They'll find edge cases and do things nobody expected. Apple will learn and Swift will change and evolve.
So will the rest of Apple's platforms. Objective-C was the result of Apple buying NeXT. Swift is the result of steady, continuous changes. It's the result of smart management and responsible stewardship, that, in the fullness of time, will likely result in just as much of a leap forward as a NeXT-style purchase.
One thing I've heard repeatedly at WWDC this week, however, is that parents and anyone interested in education are thrilled at the idea that Apple has not only introduced a new language to help propel them into the future, but one that looks to be much easier to introduce new programmers to at an even younger age — programmers who will be the future. That value is incalculable.
Apple has made the Swift Programming Language Guide available in the iBook Store. Anyone not already a seasoned Objective C programmer thinking of giving it a shot?
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