“The tech world has a knack for the unexpected. In many ways, this is its reason for being,” Klint Finley writes for Wired. “But in 2014, things were particularly surprising.”
“From Apple building a new programming language to Google acquiring Nest, it was the year of the shocker.,” Finley writes. “Typically, new Apple products are rumored for months—sometimes years—before they’re unveiled. By the time the iPhone, iPad, and iWatch [sic] arrived, each had been the subject of countless leaks and speculations. Not so with Swift, the new programming language Apple released in July. The language—which combines elements of from several different languages beloved by hardcore coders— was one of the last things anyone was expecting from Tim Cook and company. But here it is.”
Read more in the full article here.
I love Swift. Definitely the best surprise in 2014. Thank you Apple.
The more I use Swift, the more I’m loving it. I got very used to messaging in Objective-C and thought I’d really miss it, but Swift is really clear and concise. I love not having to deal with headers and garbage collection, closures are really nice, and the REPL and Playground are fantastic ways to test code quickly. Apple still has a lot of work to do (Xcode crashes a LOT), but this kind of stuff is expected. All in all a really fantastic move by Apple.
Remember those people who said Apple has lost it’s edge in innovation? Who complained about no new products?
Swift is both, highly innovative AND a new product. It’s just not hardware. But it IS part of a bigger picture that gives some clue to where Apple is heading.
Apple is just not a new hardware company. It is an ecosystem, and there’s no one else in the world working like Apple works. Swift is a clue that Apple has a lot more surprises in the future. But if they told you where they were headed, they wouldn’t be surprises and everyone would try and make something similar first. So don’t look for any big announcements until Apple is good and ready.
If you spend some time thinking about what all Swift can do, you might have some clues.
Ok why don’t you throw caution to the wind and speculate with some actual examples.
What I particularly enjoy about Swift is that it’s an infrastructure change. People won’t notice it because it “just works” of like it is said “When the shoe fits the foot is forgotten.”
A very smart move by Apple, another example of Tim Cook’s great leadership.
Swift wasn’t leaked because it was handled in-house in Cupertino. The stuff that gets leaked involves third party suppliers and manufacturers, and most of the leaks appear to originate from abroad.
I still want some hard core buffer overrun bashing of Swift to see if that ubiquitous weakness of anything C has been at last conquered. Has anyone seen such a thing as of yet?