Introduction to Swift
Hey guys, welcome to my blog on Apple's Swift. Currently Swift has been used for development in iOS, macOS, tvOS, WatchOS. As many of you guys know swift has been gaining a lot of heat since it's release. Currently swift has gained 13th position in Tiobe Index as of May 2017, where programming languages are been rated according to their number of searches conducted on a particular programming language. Note that they update this rating each month. Tiobe index is basically collecting search data from search engines like Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, here is a link that shows How Tiobe Index is calculated? This is where the major rating of programming languages comes from. Apart from Tiobe there are other rating that shows the popularity of the language such as PYPL, in which swift is holding the 10th position.
Why learn Apple's Swift?
1. General Purpose Programming Language
The major reason to go for swift currently would be to adopt a general purpose programming language. Most of you guys know that swift was open sourced by Apple. So, swift would not only be used for development in Apple products but also server side programming and much more could be achieved using Swift.
2. Readability of Swift
Most trending language currently have this in common such as python. More developers are attracted to the programming that is more readable. Especially new startups trend to use something that is currently popular and trending. Most other languages lack this quality and are the verge of extinction.
3. Safety Associated with Swift
Probably the biggest feature, which is shared by a lot of other languages, but set it apart from Python, JavaScript etc. Probably the best safe feature to be included from the beginning. Other languages now have optionals (C#, Java), but they arrived too late. If you have ever programmed in C, you will have made silly errors. Because Swift, unlike Objective-C, does not require C compatibility, it can lose a lot of these traps. For example, if require braces, switches must be exhaustive and don't require break statements. When a function can throw an error you mark it as throws. When you do this, the caller must handle it (even if it is just a try!, which you know will blow up).
4. Easy to Maintain
Swift is a statically-typed language, and xCode will check your code for errors before it builds your code. This means errors will be easier to track down. Furthermore, since statically-typed languages are also more strict with the definitions of things, you will have less strange and unexpected errors, which means your codebase will be easier to maintain as it grows in size and complexity.
5. Much Faster
As a statically typed language, Swift is faster than dynamically typed languages because things are more clearly defined. Thus, when the app is running, your machine's resources will not be wasted on checking the definition of something in your code.
Conclusion
So, guys the future of swift mostly depends on the future of Apple, which so far seems very bright. Since Apple will be focused on improving Swift in the years to come, you can expect it to stay relevant for a good while.
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