Swift Knowledge Quickly Becoming One of the Most In-Demand Skills for Freelance Developers

There are much more and much easier ways to learn Android programming than Swift. Sadly.

Wait, I don't believe Swift works for Android. Did I miss a joke?

It's a ****** language with so many bugs underneath the compiler level. Garbage collections are completely broken in certain scenario that has been reported years ago, which still havent fixed yet. Not to mention the terrible performance with Swift compare to Objective C. There is a reason why even Apple themselves are not bothering adapting to it internally.

The syntax itself is even more bizarre and crazy to read. The entire idea of unwrap and wrap is like the a beginner's protection against null pointer. They tried so hard to reinvent a language with all other language combine, it just not working out. Essentially a DoA project.

Whoever think this language is on demand, you must be on some special kind of kool-aid. Most company's CTO or engineering director have no clue or any idea on what to use, they just follow the news and hype train to decide.

This is some quality ********. First of all Swift does not have a garbage collector, it uses ARC(automatic reference counting). If you don't understand what a retain cycle is, you will have memory leaks.

Optional, what you call wrap/unwrapping is not an idea that Swift came up with, a lot of functional languages like Haskell, Scala have it. It's not a beginner's protection, it's a way to guarantee that you never touch dangling pointers, the best part is the compiler does the heavy lifting and checks it for you. Once you grok the idea that you can map over optionals, they can even save you time and lines of code.

I agree that it has somewhat of a learning curve compared to objective-c, but it's nowhere near rust. And who told you that it has worse performance than objective-c?

I seriously believe that Swift will become the go-to language in a couple of years, both in the server-side space and in the mobile space.

It's a ****** language with so many bugs underneath the compiler level. Garbage collections are completely broken in certain scenario that has been reported years ago, which still havent fixed yet. Not to mention the terrible performance with Swift compare to Objective C. There is a reason why even Apple themselves are not bothering adapting to it internally.

The syntax itself is even more bizarre and crazy to read. The entire idea of unwrap and wrap is like the a beginner's protection against null pointer. They tried so hard to reinvent a language with all other language combine, it just not working out. Essentially a DoA project.

Whoever think this language is on demand, you must be on some special kind of kool-aid. Most company's CTO or engineering director have no clue or any idea on what to use, they just follow the news and hype train to decide.

Garbage collection? Swift and Objective-C both use reference counting.

Performance in apps is no longer greatly different between Swift and Objective-C since probably Swift 2.2.

The entire syntax is incredibly similar to Objective-C, especially semantically.

You do realize that Apple has nearly 20 years of code written in Objective-C right? No company would rewrite their entire codebase just because they have a new language, they'll phase it out with probably new development being done in Swift.

Seeing as null pointers and null pointer exceptions are one of the biggest causes for bugs I think safety is good, also Java has also adopted it the Optional type in Java 8.

Apparently someone is paying for people that do know Swift so regardless of it being hype or anything else the money is flowing and also its the language supported by Apple for all of its platforms so I doubt it'll die although it might become a niche used only for Apples platforms (thats the case of Objective-C anyway) and IBM is also spending money on Swift for the server.

So either IBM, Apple and everyone else spending money on it are stupid and you're incredibly smart or the other way around, the future will tell which is which.

ARC is a form of garbage collection, just because it wrap the invisible autoreleasepool doesn't mean its really automatic.

Optional is nothing but a beginner protection. It doesn't save code, it add extra codes to save awful engineers from making corporate / enterprise software into oblivion.

ARC is not garbage collection.

ARC is compiler being smart and adding the retain/release calls to correct places automatically during compile time. The downside is every retain/release has some overhead.

A garbage collector sweeps the object graph in regular intervals during program execution, detects objects to release, and cycles. The downside is for large object graphs, this is a quite expensive operation and sometimes results in the application being frozen while the collector is running.

Optionals are an abstraction that makes life easier. You may see it as a beginner feature for awful engineers. But to be honest you sound like a beginner too.

Why would they? Google has Go and they already support a bunch of more popular third party languages, e.g. C, Java and Python. Swift doesn't bring anything new to the table.

How do you explain Google endlessly introducing new languages and frameworks then promptly dropping support for them? Dart, Go, GWT, ART, etc...

It seems like every year Google introduces a completely new developer framework or language that completely throws out the one from last year.

Swift's problem is it seems like it was created by someone who was incapable of the word no. Thus it's a language full of many ideas, great and terrible alike.

In the end, it comes out as a mediocre language.

Right.....

It's a ****** language with so many bugs underneath the compiler level. Garbage collections are completely broken in certain scenario that has been reported years ago, which still havent fixed yet. Not to mention the terrible performance with Swift compare to Objective C. There is a reason why even Apple themselves are not bothering adapting to it internally.

The syntax itself is even more bizarre and crazy to read. The entire idea of unwrap and wrap is like the a beginner's protection against null pointer. They tried so hard to reinvent a language with all other language combine, it just not working out. Essentially a DoA project.

Whoever think this language is on demand, you must be on some special kind of kool-aid. Most company's CTO or engineering director have no clue or any idea on what to use, they just follow the news and hype train to decide.

I genuinely like to see examples of this please.

The latest version of Swift has been very nice to me.