What Developers Think About Apple "Swift"

Prominent iOS developer Steve Streza said to The Next Web news that he is excited that Apple "are beginning this transition" as Swift is "modeled after the benefits of Objective-C (e.g. reference counted memory management) while putting a better syntax and style management on it."

Streza says that Swift will "cause me to rethink how I design my own APIs, with more emphasis and thought placed in how the types are conveyed" but overall, he doesn't expect a big impact to the way he works, once he gets over "the hump of learning to program in a new language."

Despite the excitement, Streza says that his biggest concern is "about the ways Objective-C and Swift work with each other" because "both seem to make pretty different assumptions about how code will be written and how APIs will return data, and it’s unclear how they'll interact when their assumptions conflict."

Streza also pointed out to me that another concern for many is the question of whether programmers will adopt the language, as many developers are resistant to change and a rift could cause frustration for those working on the platform.

Despite Streza's concerns, however, he says that he expects to "fully adopt Swift" and use it for apps he builds in the future and thinks that it would be "silly for any iOS or Mac developer to not have at least a basic comprehension of the language."

Kevin Ingersoll, a web developer based in San Francisco, explained over email that "the barrier to entry looks much lower for a web developer than Objective-C, and that’s what makes me excited about Swift" and that he’s had ideas for apps but "having to invest the time into learning Objective-C was the biggest hurdle for me – that hurdle is now gone."

Quentin Zervaas, a developer in Australia who built a popular public transport app, believes that Swift "reinforces that Apple [is] serious about making their developer tools and development workflow as easy to use, as well as looking for ways to constantly squeeze extra performance from devices."

Zervaas is looking forward to the real-time evaluating and debugging of code using the language and thinks that it "will simplify a lot of syntax" which is good news, as he previously had to write "awkward-looking code" to get things done.

Users on Hacker news are excited, too, with nln writing that even as a non-developer the changes make him feel more comfortable starting to learn how to build apps for iOS.