Swift!

by Manu (modified: 2014 Jun 04)

Once again, one can only be disappointed by the state of things in the world of software development.

Apple just announced a new programming language called Swift. The worst of worst, they are not ashamed to take the name of an already existing programming language (check out http://www.swift-lang.org developed by the University of Chicago). I've quickly look at the documentation they are providing with their new language and the syntax is slightly better but still it is not a nice one.

The documentation starts by teaching you 2 things:

  • println ("Hello World!")
  • how to define a constant and a variable

As if this is what makes a programming language, this is lame.

Apple should have thought about looking around before creating yet another language. They should have chosen Eiffel of course, or the many other existing languages that are nicer to use than Ojective-C. It shows that they do not care much about reuse which you can see everywhere in their products since every 2 or 3 years they do not hesitate to make things obsolete forcing you to update. As I see it, it seems that in a few years from now, developers who haven't updated their code to Swift might be suffering. Too bad, it doesn't have to be this way.