“Swift, Apple’s new programming language billed as taking the C out of Objective-C, was one of the biggest surprises at WWDC 2014,” Rene Ritchie reports for iMore. “The Swift project started at Apple roughly 4 years ago as one of several explorations into what would replace the NeXT-era Object-C language.”
“It was spearheaded by Chris Lattner, head of Apple’s developer tools department, who also spearheaded LLVM (lower level virtual machine) and Clang, Apple’s compiler technologies,” Ritchie reports. “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. It’s also something more.”
Ritchie reports, “Objective-C was unlikely to be in any grade school curriculum, unlikely to be any child’s first programming language. We’ll have to wait and see how Swift and Playgrounds fare, but if they really do make it easier to engage new programmers at a younger age the value to Apple, the industry, and the future will be incalculable.”
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