Swift Programming Language Introduction
Welcome to my own personal course in programming in Swift!
So first, let's take a quick history lesson, just so we know what we're dealing with here. Swift as a programming language was created by Apple Inc. Development started in 2010 lead by Chris Lattner, soon followed by other developers at Apple. Based on Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU and many other languages, Swift has won many awards, including first place for Most Loved Programming Language in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2015, as well as second place in 2016.
As it is developed by Apple, it comes bundled with Xcode, the IDE from Apple used to develop software for iOS and Mac OS X, starting at Xcode 6.1. In this course we will be using Xcode to develop Swift apps for iOS, since I am currently an iOS Developer. Feel free to experiment with other IDE's or tools using the tools you have learned in this course, in fact, as a developer, it would be very beneficial, even necessary, for you to experiment with as many tools and IDE's as possible, not to mention languages.
Swift is an object-oriented language, which means it works with classes and objects. It also has a ton of other nifty structures, such as something known as a struct, which is a type of class, but with a sleight difference. While on the subject of object orientation, Swift has taken the best of Objective-C, C# and other object-oriented languages and put together for itself a very powerful set of features. We now have all this power right here at our disposal, to use in any way we wish! Other new and powerful features include Optionals, Closures, guard-else error handling and computed properties. We will cover this, as well as other language constructs, later on.
I don't know about you, but I'm really excited to get started with coding, so this means you as my reader have now come across a crossroads in your life. You can either choose to go on to the next part of this course, which is Lesson 1: Swift Variables and Functions, or you can turn around, close the tab, and go on with your life. I leave it you.
So first, let's take a quick history lesson, just so we know what we're dealing with here. Swift as a programming language was created by Apple Inc. Development started in 2010 lead by Chris Lattner, soon followed by other developers at Apple. Based on Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU and many other languages, Swift has won many awards, including first place for Most Loved Programming Language in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2015, as well as second place in 2016.
As it is developed by Apple, it comes bundled with Xcode, the IDE from Apple used to develop software for iOS and Mac OS X, starting at Xcode 6.1. In this course we will be using Xcode to develop Swift apps for iOS, since I am currently an iOS Developer. Feel free to experiment with other IDE's or tools using the tools you have learned in this course, in fact, as a developer, it would be very beneficial, even necessary, for you to experiment with as many tools and IDE's as possible, not to mention languages.
Swift is an object-oriented language, which means it works with classes and objects. It also has a ton of other nifty structures, such as something known as a struct, which is a type of class, but with a sleight difference. While on the subject of object orientation, Swift has taken the best of Objective-C, C# and other object-oriented languages and put together for itself a very powerful set of features. We now have all this power right here at our disposal, to use in any way we wish! Other new and powerful features include Optionals, Closures, guard-else error handling and computed properties. We will cover this, as well as other language constructs, later on.
I don't know about you, but I'm really excited to get started with coding, so this means you as my reader have now come across a crossroads in your life. You can either choose to go on to the next part of this course, which is Lesson 1: Swift Variables and Functions, or you can turn around, close the tab, and go on with your life. I leave it you.
Comments
Post a Comment