9 years ago from Diego Lafuente, UX/UI
Apple showed today a glimpse of Swift, a new programing languages with those characteristics that coders love, like generics, closures and so on. What do you think about?
I'm really intrigued with it. As a designer who likes to code, this seems a good idea, in fact, the code examples seemed readable to me.
I spent the last six months learning Objective-C .. damn
I know the feeling.
That's awesome, I'm jealous. You're in a much better position than someone who would be starting to learn Swift with no Objective-C experience.
You're right! I will continue developing my Objective-C skills and finish the apps I started.
Here's also a good excerpt from the Treehouse FAQ:
Q. I just started learning Objective-C, should I just learn Swift instead?
A. As mentioned above, Apple has released a comprehensive book on the language so by all means start learning Swift. After glancing through the book I believe that on some levels Swift may be harder to learn because of the advanced features mentioned above. My suggestion would be to continue learning Objective-C, although it may look difficult syntactically but conceptually it's a much simpler language and great for a beginner. Once you get the hang of Objective-C then switching over to Swift will be a lot easier because the two languages are quite similar.
so you'll have a head start opposed to someone who didn't. It's not like it's that different plus Foundation, UIKit etc are still intact.
The familiarity with the Cocoa APIs you now have will make picking up swift a lot easier.
Super excited for this and can't wait to try it. I love that:
The only downside is that this isn't cross-platform. I can live with that for now.
I love the playground with its Bret Victor-style approach. I'm downloading Xcode 6 beta now to start playing with it. Now we just need a similar IDE for web development (maybe NoFlo?).
Where are you downloading it from?
There is an IDE being built with this philosophy, currently.
It's still early in the making, but you should take a look at Light Table :)
Light Table will at some point in the future have this...it doesn't as of now.
Can you run Xcode 6 alongside Xcode 5 or are you only allowed to run one version of Xcode at a time?
I believe there is no problem having them installed together.
I have them both right now.
When you say cross platform you mean windows-mac? You can code for OS X and iOS with Swift.
Wanted to shout out loud when I saw the Bret Victor inspired playground. His "Inventing on Principle" talk shook up my perception of creating with code, and the rest of his research has left such an impact on me I noted the day I discovered his work in my journal. I consider him something of a prophet in our field — against the grain, visionary, yet solitary/singular/independent.
Also interesting: he used to work at Apple, but can't talk about the prototypes he worked on that never saw the light of day.
+1 for Bret Victor. The guy's a genius; really happy to see some of his ideas coming to light.
If it's roughly as effective as the Pokémon attack, it's going to be laughable.
Seems like the perfect time to get into iOS development. Kinda really excited!
Apple kills Flash, then announces its own version ActionScript with tongue-in-cheek name. i like their style.
What does this have to do with Swift? I'm genuinely curious.
I think because flash files would compile as .swf
I think Xcode's new playground is the most intriguing part of this release. Swift + Xcode 6 + CloudKit might be just the right mix to get more designers programming because it introduces a) a readable programming language with Swift, b) realtime feedback with Xcode playground, and c) server-side abstraction with CloudKit (server admin being the first and oftentimes fatal obstacle in learning to program and develop apps).
That is some solid motivation! :)
I was just about the start the Design+Code book (designcode.io) to learn Xcode + Obj-C but I think I'm better off just reading the Swift book (https://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/swift-programming-language/id881256329?mt=11).
Everything in the book still applies. I will write a chapter 4 with new techniques using Swift, live rendering, cloudkit, extensions, etc.
I looked at the book and it's very code centric. I will try to make sense of it all for designers.
Great, I bought your book 2 days ago and was worried after today announcement, but this information cheered me up :)
Please. The book has no reference on how to use it with the actual UI from iOS. Prototyping fast with code + interface builder can be nice.
I'm skeptical of the performance claims (type inference is sloooooooow) but it'll be interesting see how the language looks. I'm excited.
Considering you can build JS apps which perform on par with native I'm going to guess this will work just fine.
Not quite. If an app is not computationally expensive (for example, rendering a list of tweets or displaying chat messages as they come in) then it may be that computers are fast enough that there is no discernible difference between native code and interpreted code. However, if you step outside that realm (for example, rendering a 3D scene with ray tracing, bump maps, subsurface scattering, etc) then you will be able to coax much better performance out of native code.
TL;DR even if from a user's perspective Hello World in JS performs just as well as in C, Call of Duty will not.
Yes, I totally agree with that. But, even WebGL and Canavas work quite nicely on mobile. Surely an Apple product will be better optimized than those technologies.
Not to mention their new Metal API provides access to lower APIs.
Maybe I'm just too optimistic :)
Type inference in this case is a compiler concern.
Type inference is not slow. It might be slower than typing a type directly but it doesn't slow running application because it determines types at compile time. Although it might take longer to compile. But we are talking about milliseconds.
I'm so pumped for this. Even doing some Smalltalk dev back in the day I could never get down with how Obj-C "felt" to code with. Smart of Apple to lower the barrier to entry and give JS devs a way in.
Dude I was about to invest some money on iOS training but decided hold until this event. Glad I did it. Swift looks great! Can't wait to get my hands dirty :)
Quartz Composer is Dead, Long live Swift! ;-)
I was about to start learning Objective C. So this was the right time ;)
I haven't been so excited about a programming language since Ruby — this looks like best parts of ECMAscript 6 and Ruby mashed together into one big blob of awesome.
Same here! It's weird that Swift was my favorite part of the Keynote. Actually, more than the language, I think I'm excited about the Playground tool they've built - though it looks heavily inspired by Bret Victor's tool.
It's not weird at all because that's the most surprising /exciting thing Apple can do at a Developer Conference and they did it.
Hah! True that. Now I just need to find a project to use it for :)
Yep, look like js the bits I've read so far.
The examples are really digestable.
Yeah true, I've been reading through the first few pages. I can't wait to be able to download Xcode 6!
Swift is a new programming language for iOS and OS X apps that builds on the best of C and Objective-C, without the constraints of C compatibility. Swift adopts safe programming patterns and adds modern features to make programming easier, more flexible, and more fun.
Fragment from the book “The Swift Programming Language”. iBooks. https://itun.es/es/jEUH0.l
Playing with the simple examples from the Swift book in Xcode 6b Playground makes a lot of fun as long as Xcode does not crash. Alas, this happens quite a lot while targeting iOS as platform. Switching to 'OS X' and commenting out 'import UIKit' seems to make it faster and more stable.
The live coding stuff is pretty killer, can't wait to dig into this.
I wonder where this will leave projects like Phonegap, Cordova, Ionic Framework, etc. Will it make iOS development accessible enough that web developers will just bypass those tools in favour of jumping straight in with Swift? It seems to remove or at least hide a lot of the lower-level stuff.
A major selling point for those examples is that you can easily publish your app on multiple platforms though, so they'll definitely still have their place.
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