The biggest reaction from the crowd at WWDC yesterday wasn’t for a shiny new product or even a cool new app. Instead, the news that Apple was introducing its own programming language, Swift, got a full-throated roar of appreciation from the thousands of developers in attendance. Even without knowing a thing about programming, it’s easy to understand this is a big deal: Apple’s current language of choice, Objective-C, has been in the mix for Macs since the launch of OS X, and for iPhones and iPads from day one. For Apple to throw out the developer playbook across its entire product portfolio suggests there’s a big change afoot
With plans to slowly retire the long-used Objective-C, Apple has introduced a new programming language, called Swift, for designing apps and applications to run on Apple iOS devices and Apple Macintosh computers. Apple designed Swift to be as intuitive and easy to use as popular interpreted languages such as Python and JavaScript, while maintaining the speed and flexibility of compiled languages such as C++. “Swift is fast. It is modern. It is designed for safety and it enables a level of interactively and development you’ve never seen before on the platform,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook, who introduced the language to the surprise of the audience at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference, being held this week in San Francisco. Cook explained that Swift was designed to eliminate entire categories of common programming errors. It includes modern constructs such as generics, closures, type inference, multiple return types, operator overloads and other time-saving capabilities that developers have wanted to see in their languages.
