Apple’s biggest breakthrough that almost no one knows about

“Ask the average Apple fan to make a list of the important moves the company has made in the past year or so, and the list will probably start with the Apple Watch before ticking off the huge sales of bigger iPhones and the $3 billion deal for Beats Electronics,” Joshua Brustein reports for Bloomberg. “A particularly news-savvy fan might even cite rumors about an Apple car. Put the same question to an Apple developer, and the list of milestones will almost certainly include something that has flown under the radar of most devoted Apple users: Swift, a new computer language introduced by the company a year ago.”

“Many of those attending this year’s WWDC, which starts on June 8, have spent the past year learning how to write apps using Swift,” Brustein reports. “Red Monk, a firm that has been doing regular rankings of programming languages for the last five years, describes the language’s growth as “essentially unprecedented.” Just seven months after its inception, Swift had become the 22nd most popular language out of the hundreds of major languages that exist. ”

“Universities and informal educational outfits have jumped to fill demand to learn Swift. Ray Wenderlich, a developer who runs a popular website for programming tutorials, said he immediately shifted his focus almost entirely to the new language,” Brustein reports. “‘The response was crazy for Swift,’ he says. ‘That’s all the people want.'”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Note: The Swift Programming Language, a free 500-page manual from Apple, is available via iBooks Store here.

SEE ALSO:

One year on with Apple’s Swift – May 28, 2015
Swift performance in Apple’s Xcode 6.3 beta – February 18, 2015
Longtime NeXT/Apple developer exalts Swift 1.2 – February 10, 2015
Apple’s new Swift programming language takes flight – February 7, 2015

18 Comments

    1. Read the article. In one metric, Swift is Number One…

      “Early reviews of the language have been overwhelmingly positive, and a survey in February of more than 26,000 developers conducted by Stack Overflow, a website for coders, named Swift the world’s most-loved computer programming language.”

  1. If you’ve used both Objective-C and Swift it’s not at all surprising why Swift is so popular. Objective-C may be capable but it’s a clumsy, verbose, nighmarish frankenstein’s monster from the 1980s. Swift is a faster and easier language to code in.

  2. I think Samsung’s new programming language is called Drift.

    Or maybe it’s Swift Plus.

    Of course it has the same look and feel as Swift, but it’s slower and made out of plastic. 😉

  3. Funny how an article very much like this one was published just after last year’s WWDC, pointing out that it was the real highlight of the week.

    Swift, by most reports, still has some maturation to go. But I fully expect a lot of that will arrive next week. 😀

  4. I’m kind of wondering if Apple has any desire to move Swift towards web development? Possibly include a Swift RTE in Webkit next to the JavaScript RTE.

    Imagine being able to build web apps right along side, OS X and iOS apps with Xcode.

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