{"id":1352,"date":"2014-06-06T08:22:46","date_gmt":"2014-06-06T15:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/?p=1352"},"modified":"2014-06-06T08:29:45","modified_gmt":"2014-06-06T15:29:45","slug":"swift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/swift\/","title":{"rendered":"Swift"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Apple announced a new programming language called <a href=\"https:\/\/developer.apple.com\/swift\/\">Swift<\/a> earlier this week at <a href=\"https:\/\/developer.apple.com\/wwdc\/\">WWDC 2014<\/a>. The focus during\u00a0the keynote was ease of use, and indeed the language is incredibly exciting as a learning tool. But this is not a simplistic language. It is extremely powerful, extremely well crafted, and designed to replace Objective-C for professional software development. In many ways it feels like the next evolution\u00a0in the line of C, C++, Obj-C, C#&#8230; but they ran out of &#8220;C&#8221; modifiers and instead called it Swift.<\/p>\n<p>Swift can be easily adopted by software companies because it is interoperable with most existing code written in C, C++, and Objective-C. You don&#8217;t have to rewrite your app from scratch just to get started.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/nondot.org\/sabre\/\">developer tools team<\/a> is also shipping a live coding environment\u00a0inspired by\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/worrydream.com\/#!\/LearnableProgramming\">Bret Victor<\/a>. This is truly\u00a0exciting to see, and I suspect they are only just getting started. This environment is not only useful for beginners, it\u00a0will also change the way professional programming is done: instead of building and debugging entire apps, developers can prototype, explore, and debug individual modules interactively in the &#8220;playground&#8221;. The documentation also lives in this environment, so you can play with example code and see the results in real time.<\/p>\n<p>I have a lot more to learn about Swift, but my initial impressions are that it has achieved the high praise of\u00a0&#8220;<a title=\"Obvious Only in Retrospect\" href=\"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/obvious-only-in-retrospect\/\">obvious only in retrospect<\/a>.&#8221; I suspect it will significantly influence the software\u00a0community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apple announced a new programming language called Swift earlier this week at WWDC 2014. The focus during\u00a0the keynote was ease of use, and indeed the language is incredibly exciting as a learning tool. But this is not a simplistic language. It is extremely powerful, extremely well crafted, and designed to replace Objective-C for professional software &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/swift\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Swift&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1352"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1360,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352\/revisions\/1360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}