“Every day, more and more developers are being hired based on their Swift skills. Apple is committed to Swift and Swift is the future,” Erica Sadun writes. “Not a day goes by without some developer wandering by for Swift peer support with ‘I have to use Swift’ because it’s in the contract.”
“I have shipped only one Swift app for live app store sale and I absolutely love Swift,” Sadun writes. “Everything else remains in Objective-C. And, yes, it’s painful to move back and forth between languages. As my brain trains for Swift, my Objective-C reflexes are taking a big hit.”
“Swift, despite migration support and ever increasing stability of language fundamentals, is not stable or will be for a while to come,” Sadun writes. “Apple’s message of ‘Swift now. Swift for production’ is becoming a big issue for developers… So how do you break the news to your client, your boss, or that new guy on your team who saw a few WWDC videos that Swift is better suited for a long-term investment than short-term development tasks?”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: h4labs responds:
Less code and more maintainable code directly translates to a cost saving. The only valid argument developers have is that Swift is still an evolving language so the source will break, at least in the next version. I claim that you’re still better off writing in Swift and fixing any breaking changes than writing in Objective C. You will have done less work and your code will be safer and more maintainable.
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s open source Swift will open the door for HomeKit – December 16, 2015
Apple has hugely ambitious plans for open-sourced Swift, and hints on what’s coming to iOS – December 15, 2015
After Apple open sources it, IBM puts Swift programming in the cloud – December 4, 2015
Apple officially releases Swift programming language as open source – December 3, 2015
Apple’s open-sourced Swift programming language could change everything – November 25, 2015
Apple’s Swift programming language could soon infiltrate data centers – November 24, 2015
Developers band together to create Mandarin Chinese translation of Apple’s Swift programming language – August 6, 2015
Apple’s Swift breaks into top 20 in dev language survey; bad news for Microsoft’s Visual Basic – July 2, 2015
Apple’s Swift: The future of enterprise app development – June 10, 2015
Swift is a neat language and its in its infancy currently.
The hype around it currently reminds me a lot of the hype around every other high level language that has come before.
Java, c#, Python etc. etc. went through the same rising tide of excitement followed by the crashing wave of reality and then expectations came back down to earth.
Swift will follow a similar path, all programming languages do.
“And, yes, it’s painful to move back and forth between languages. As my brain trains for Swift, my Objective-C reflexes are taking a big hit.”
Damn I hate whiney programmers. Back when I when programming was my main task (writing software to do nuclear simulations) I jumped back and forth between different variations of FORTRAN, Assembler, COBOL, Pascal, and, yes, even BASIC depending on the machine I was using. (And yes, Cray FORTRAN was very, very different from Absoft FORTRAN that ran on the Mac.)
The little I’ve played with Swift has shown me it still has a way to go, but it is clear to me that Swift is more robust (and evolving faster) at this stage than any other programming language with which I’ve played.
I agree. I currently shift between 3 different languages in any given day depending on what task or project I am working on.
Anyone proficient in Java or C# is going to feel right at home with Swift and adapt quickly in my opinion.
And what developers should demand is ‘const’ instead of the word ‘let’ to define constants.
Why use ‘var’ and not use ‘const’?
For that matter… why not use ‘variable’, ‘variables’, ‘constant’ and ‘constants’ as key words. no s single object expected, with s as in constants more than one constant definition follows. ‘let’ just reads corny.
i’m just on page 10 so far. 🙂 like anything, we’ll get use to it, i guess.