UPGRADE YOUR SKILLS: Learn advanced Swift and SwiftUI on Hacking with Swift+! >>

Why Swift?

Paul Hudson    @twostraws   

Updated for Xcode 15

There are lots of programming languages out there, but I think you’re going to really enjoy learning Swift. This is partly for practical reasons – you can make a lot of money on the App Store! – but there are lots of technical reasons too.

You see, Swift is a relatively young language, having launched only in 2014. This means it doesn’t have a lot of the language cruft that old languages can suffer from, and usually means there is only one way to solve a particular problem.

At the same time, being such a new programming language means that Swift leverages all sorts of new ideas built upon the successes – and sometimes mistakes – of older languages. For example, it makes it hard to accidentally write unsafe code, it makes it very easy to write code that is clear and understandable, and it supports all the world languages so you’ll never see those strange character errors that plague other languages.

Swift itself is just the language, and isn’t designed to draw anything on the screen. When it comes to building software with Swift, you’ll be using SwiftUI: Apple’s powerful framework that creates text, buttons, images, user interaction, and much more. As the name suggests, SwiftUI was built for Swift – it’s literally designed to leverage the power and safety offered by the language, which makes it remarkably quick to build really powerful apps.

So, you should learn Swift because you can make a lot of money with it, but also because it does so many things really well. No cruft, no confusion, just lots of power at your fingertips. What’s not to like?

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