Earlier today Apple made good on its promise and released source code for its Swift programming language to the public. To go along with making Swift open source, Apple’s senior vice president of software Craig Federighi has sat down for a pair of interviews to discuss the benefits of open souring Swift and what’s in store for the future…
In an interview with The Next Web, Federighi touted that Apple believes Swift is the next major programming language and the one developers will program in for the “coming several decades.” That’s a bold statement on the Apple executive’s part, but he believes that the combination of the langauge’s ease of use and versatility will lend itself nicely to developers.
Regarding the future of Objective C, Federighi said that Apple will continue to support the language for both itself and the developer community. “I don’t think anyone should have to fear for the future of Objective C,” Federighi said. For new developers, however, he encourages everyone to start with Swift.
Federighi went on to note that the main goal of an open source Swift is letting everyone adopt it and know everything about it. If a university wants to revise their core curriculum and start teaching programming in Swift, it being open source really makes that an easy decision for them to make,” he explained. Federighi says that Apple has no concerns about where it doesn’t want developers to adopt Swift. “The more Swift the merrier,” Federighi said.
In an interview with Ars Technica, Federighi elaborated more on the idea of Swift being taught to up and coming developers, both those learning in a university and own their own.
Federighi also elaborated that another reason Apple open sourced Swift is to increase interaction with developers. The Apple executive noted that many of the changes made in Swift 2.0 were things that the company learned in interacting with early adopters of the platform. Now that Swift is completely open source, Apple hopes that interaction will deepen.
