Now in its forth year, Swift – Apple’s new programming language – is already at version 4, has undergone significant development, and has now been fully open-sourced! It’s had one of the fastest adoptions of any new language ever (for reasons we’ll discuss) and has been turning the world of Apple development on its head.
But what’s different about it? How does it fit in with other modern languages? Is it a functional language, as some rumours have suggested? Does it have any unique features? Should you care about it at all if you are not in the Apple eco-system (or even if you are)? We’ll look at answers to at all these questions and get a flavour of the language itself.
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Swift for the Curious
Phil Nash
Phil is the author of the test frameworks, Catch - for C++ and Objective-C, and Swordfish for Swift. As Developer Advocate at JetBrains he's involved with CLion, AppCode and ReSharper C++. More generally he's an advocate for good testing practices, TDD and using the type system and functional techniques to reduce complexity and increase correctness. He's previously worked in Finance and Mobile as well as an independent consultant and coach specialising in TDD on iOS.re.