Listeners to last week’s Coder Radio know that during the live feed WWDC coverage, I was less than enthused with the announcement of Swift, Apple’s new programming language for iOS and OS X. My initial reaction was based on the somewhat unclear way they announced Swift; it was not very clear what they wanted us developers to use Swift for and that led me to the wrong conclusion that Swift is designed to be a near to medium term 100% replacement for Objective-C – this simply is not the case. So far, I’ve read through the Swift book on iBooks and the documentation publicly available twice and found something very surprising – Swift reminds of QML in QT.
This might sound a bit odd, given that in a lot of significant ways Swift and QML are very different languages, but they actually share a kindred spirit and will likely take the same place in my tool-chain – layouts. Yes, both Swift and QML are technically capable of so much more than layouts but really they are both well suited for that task in particular. Why do you think the WWDC demo was so UI / visuals heavy?
So the bottom line is no I don’t hate Swift and no I don’t think it will be the end of Apple development as we know it. And yes, I will be using it but, at least for the next year or so, in the same capacity as QML and its relationship with Objective-C will be same as QML’s with C++ in my QT code-bases.
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