"Hey Siri" support and possibly wireless charging case alongside AirPower charging mat.
'Swift' Programming Language in Development for Four Years, "Major Focus" Since 2013
The Swift programming language was as close to a "One More Thing" as there was at the WWDC Keynote this week, debuting to significant cheers from the developers in the audience. Immediate reaction after the keynote suggested Swift was "huge news" and the future of development on Apple products.Apple says Swift code is "concise yet expressive", interactive and fun. For coders, the introduction to Swift is available on the iBooks Store but Chris Lattner, head of Apple's Developer Tools department, shared additional information on Swift on his personal webpage (via TechCrunch).
Now that Swift is public, Lattner revealed that he began working on Swift in mid-2010, with a team of coders "contributing in earnest" late in 2011. Last July, Swift finally became the major focus of Lattner's Developer Tools Group.
The Swift language is the product of tireless effort from a team of language experts, documentation gurus, compiler optimization ninjas, and an incredibly important internal dogfooding group who provided feedback to help refine and battle-test ideas. Of course, it also greatly benefited from the experiences hard-won by many other languages in the field, drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list.Lattner says that he hopes to make programming "more approachable and fun" with Swift, getting rid of extraneous materials to make programming easier to learn.
The Xcode Playgrounds feature and REPL were a personal passion of mine, to make programming more interactive and approachable. The Xcode and LLDB teams have done a phenomenal job turning crazy ideas into something truly great. Playgrounds were heavily influenced by Bret Victor's ideas, by Light Table and by many other interactive systems.
"We'll appeal to the next generation of programmers and to help redefine how Computer Science is taught," Lattner writes.
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59 months ago
Today's programmers have it easy.
We programmers from the 80s used to have to build linked lists from dirt and bits of string we found on the ground.
The programmers from the 70s had to punch their code out on cards and feed the cards into the machine.
Inferred variable types...pshaw.
We programmers from the 80s used to have to build linked lists from dirt and bits of string we found on the ground.
The programmers from the 70s had to punch their code out on cards and feed the cards into the machine.
Inferred variable types...pshaw.
59 months ago
I wonder how long I can coast on my suddenly-very-appropriate username on Macrumors...
59 months ago
If you think Swift is great, wait till you see the new language from samsung. They started working on it one day before Apple started working on Swift.
It's gonna totally change the industry.
It's gonna totally change the industry.
59 months ago
Absolutely! There wasn't a murmur of this leading up to WWDC. I watched the keynote, and my jaw just about hit the floor when they announced Swift. Yes, definitely could have been a 'one more thing' if Jobs had been around to deliver the keynote. And it's interesting to know that this was started under his watch.
No overseas partners to leak it to sites like this one.
59 months ago
I can't wait to start working with this. Objective C is archaic to say the least
59 months ago
This changes everything. Again.
Predicting Mac OS XI and iOS X to be built from the ground up using Swift.
Predicting Mac OS XI and iOS X to be built from the ground up using Swift.
59 months ago
Swift looks pretty cool, and I'm excited to start learning it at some point.....
.....but the visual part of me wishes that the white bird in the icon were flying upwards towards the top right corner instead downwards towards the bottom right corner. I guess I just have to deal with it!
.....but the visual part of me wishes that the white bird in the icon were flying upwards towards the top right corner instead downwards towards the bottom right corner. I guess I just have to deal with it!
59 months ago
.....but the visual part of me wishes that the white bird in the icon were flying upwards towards the top right corner instead downwards towards the bottom right corner. I guess I just have to deal with it!
That's pretty much how swifts fly, though, in real life. They're swiftest when they're swooping down, generally to snatch bugs out of the air, then they rise again and lose speed. The split tail is for extra maneuverability. Somebody at Apple is a birdwatcher ;).
59 months ago
It seems that once again Apple's marketing department succeeded at telling people that Apple invented something that, in fact, was conceived by others and is based upon this tax-payer funded Open Source project
There's no connection between Swift and Swift other than the name and the fact they're both programming languages.
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