Concerning Swift

I came across an excellent article by Erica Sadun talking about her experiences with the Xcode Betas and her expectations of Swift 1.0, and I think it was a nice dose of reality. (…And not only because I have a domain that will be obsolete in a post Objective-C world.)

It’s nice to pretend that we will all be writing Swift apps by the end of the year, but if this git repo is any indication, we will have a little while to go before the language is stable enough for prime time.

I feel sorry for all the people who decided that Swift was their excuse to start learning iOS development, because of all the strange quirks with Objective-C compatibility, it won’t be as easy as picking up a Swift book and writing an app. There will be challenges and changes for at least the next year and possibly longer. As it is now, you will have to update your Swift apps very often to keep up with what will certainly be many revisions of the language.

I have a friend who I am trying to teach iOS development, and even though it will be available fairly soon, I have urged him to pretend that Swift doesn’t exist for the time being, and I urge the same to anyone else just starting out.

I intend to practice what I preach, while I will undoubtably tinker with Swift over the next several months (I am not completely nuts), I will not do any serious writing in it until they at least start updating the Cocoa API’s to be a bit more Swift-like.