waffle

Four years ago, here:

It is my belief that Apple is definitely working on a new language to surpass Objective-C as their intended, primary, publicly recommended programming language, which I will call “xlang”.

Apple today announced a new programming language called Swift, along with some numbers that make me think they want people using it.

A few days later:

Things I did not say: [..]
That Objective-C will be taken out back and shot.
That people would need to use either xlang or Objective-C to write one program.

It’s also entirely possible for this to be mixed with Objective-C within one app — Objective-C and MacRuby get along fine, don’t they? When I said “surpass”, I did qualify it as “their intended, primary, publicly recommended programming language”, never as the “only” one.

Swift uses the same runtime as Objective-C and co-mingles with Objective-C and C just fine.

[several references to garbage collection]

I will allow these transgressions on the grounds that ARC had not yet been announced or maybe even started.

C isn’t going to go away. Objective-C isn’t going to go away. There’s a way to recognize both those things and see that a new language could be modern, stable, small, fast, and provide better models and abstractions.

Swift has generics and tuples and multiple return values and type inference out the wazoo.

The change has happened. The window is rapidly disappearing where people will remember that these predictions were just the ramblings of a mad man. The point is that my wet dream, what I said out loud years ago and by now didn’t think would happen any time soon, was just announced in front of a room of 6000 developers to original iPhone-magnitude cheering.

Yes, I’m gloating. Yes, I’m reveling. What would you do?

Postscript: xlang was theorized on June 19th, 2010. John Gruber linked to it on July 6th, 2010. Chris Lattner — the inventor of LLVM and clang lead — ‘s site currently says “I started work on the Swift Programming Language [..] in July of 2010.” What I’m doing right now is winking and nudging, wildly.

After it, therefore because of it is a common enough fallacy that it has a fancy latin name. To the great benefit of everyone, Bret Victor’s shadow looms larger over the Swift and Xcode 6 tooling than any other ever will over the language, but no matter the inspiration, I’m very happy about the perspiration.