What is the state of the Swift programming language?

5    16 Feb 2016 14:42 by u/jimmyrussel

So it has now been some time since it's release (about a year). What's been the experience after it went open source? Have a good number of iOS devs made the switch from objective C?

I'm looking at trying my hand at some iOS development, but would I be better served learning swift instead?

2 comments

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I'm a full-time iOS developer, and we've been working Swift into our daily lives since 2.0 was released. The benefits are impressive, tbh, but I would caution you that it's very easy to write your Swift code in such a way that you don't really get as much benefit. What you want to do is really focus on learning as much about the Functional Programming side of Swift as you can.

You can approach Swift as just an object-oriented language that has really strong typing, and you get some benefits from Objective-C. But, it just feels like you're operating a language with a lot of heavy safety gear on. The strong typing is really meant to allow functional structures, like monads and higher-order functions. Even if you just sorta "get the idea" about how FP works and you try to use it to cut down the hairiness of your everyday structures, you'll see the benefits.

Functional programming languages are a big push right now. I wouldn't necessarily say that FP as it's always existed is going to be "the" paradigm of the next decade, but I can say for sure that embracing FP early seems (so far) to be very, very beneficial to one's career.