Apple Released Programming Language "Swift"

Every programmer was surprised last 3 December after Apple kept its promise to make its popular new programming language Swift "open source." This means that anyone can download the language, use it, see how it's put together, and make and share changes.

Within 30 minutes of the announcement, the news had already gone viral on Hacker News and Reddit, and the website Swift.org was struggling to keep up.

The excitement grew stymied because of one problem. Although Apple had promised to make the code available via GitHub — the website where such open-source projects are shared — the code wasn't there. Nobody can find it and the GitHub page referred to was empty.

Everyone was speculating that the Swift.org site was accidentally leaked live by mistake.

Business Insider has actually revealed that it learned that this is exactly what happened. According to Julie Bort, all was supposed to go live later in the day, at 1:00 P.M. ET and then it was a what-the-heck moment. They left it live and let everyone stay in suspense for a few hours until the actual files were made public on GitHub.

Apple had actually promised that it would open-source Swift months ago, so everyone knew this day was coming sooner or later.

Apple says that Swift has been in development for many years and will feel familiar to veteran developers while being friendlier to new developers. Swift is not only faster, but supports many modern programming conventions, such as closures, generics, type inference, multiple return types and namespaces.

Apple also said that the language is easier to learn, and to help that process it has created an 'interactive playground' for developers.

The files are now available, and the project has zoomed to the top of the trending charts on GitHub, too.