
Why Coders Are Going Nuts Over Apple’s New Programming Language - Libertatea
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/apple-swift-language/
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michaelcampbell
People at the WWDC showed enthusiasm; I'd hardly call this "coders" as if it
encompassed the entire coding ecosystem.

I find it interesting, but a majority of what I'm reading from others
indicates:

* It's interesting

* It feels like Go.

* It borrows heavily from Rust

but the biggest thing...

* It's better than Objective-C

But then, this is Wired.

~~~
krisgee
>It's better than Objective-C

This is pretty much the only thing we (programmers) at my work were talking
about yesterday. The language itself is pretty neat but not really anything
groundbreaking. The fact that you can code iOS without using Objective-C or
busting down to the C++ level is really great news though.

~~~
uvTwitch
I've been doing this (writing for iOS without using Objective C) for a long
time now using Xamarin, so my reaction to the announcement was along the lines
of "oh, that's cute."

------
titaniumdecoy
> For both Larson and Pollak, one of Swift’s biggest advantages over
> Objective-C is that it does what’s called “automatic garbage collection.”
> Basically, this means that it will automatically dispose of unneeded
> information that’s sitting in a machine’s memory, and the result is that
> developers won’t have to spend a lot of time and energy trying to deal with
> memory management on their own. This is the primary reason that Larson
> believes Swift can reach a much larger number of developers.

Ummm... Automatic Reference Counting is not new to Swift (nor is it "garbage
collection"), and has been part of Objective-C since 2011.

[https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/AutomaticReferenceCounting.html)

------
krisgee
> With something that Apple calls an “interactive playground,” Swift is even
> exploring a highly visual kind of programming that may go beyond other
> mainstream languages

I thought the "interactive playground" was just a REPL, is it something more?

~~~
matthewmacleod
Yes, it's more than a REPL.

It doesn't work at the level of single expressions. It's more like a script
editor that re-runs the script in realtime, as it's edited. It also allows
real-time inspection of values, with useful visual representations (e.g.
graphs of values over time, colours, paths, images etc.)

It's pretty cool, though I'm not sure how much use it is over a regular
debugger for an experienced programmer. Great for playing around with though.

~~~
michaelcampbell
So... like a smalltalk environment? Or something like jsfiddle for javascript?

