Learning Swift

I started working through Apple’s The Swift Programming Language about a month ago, and I fell into a groove with Swift almost immediately. Writing Swift feels familiar — almost like I’m writing in some intermediate language between C and Python.

I have zero experience writing Objective-C, so I’ll avoid making direct comparisons. What I will say is Swift reads a hell of a whole lot better than Objective-C. Sometimes I end up using Github like StumbleUpon ¹ and I find myself staring at a 3,000 line Objective-C file. The whole goddamn thing is covered in square brackets, and there are seemingly random references to id everywhere. I’ve never been more terrified in my life.

Swift reads very cleanly — almost like pseudocode. I have spent the last few weekends with this brand new language, and I’m confident I could stumble my way through someone else’s code at this point. Comparatively, disregarding my feelings for bracketed markup, I feel lost when I read Objective-C. ²

I love the idea of getting in on the ground floor of something — potentially shaping the idioms that come out of this community in the next few years. When I started learning Python, this was the biggest struggle for me. I had rather basic experience in C and Java, and it seemed like there were all these gotchas to writing Python code. Somehow everyone knew the ins-and-outs of for-in loops, and I’m over here writing index variables. Later I realized there was a pythonic way of doing things. Swift doesn’t really have this yet, and so far it seems like one of those good problems to have.