Apple unveiled a new programming language at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in early June, Swift, claiming that it would make life easier for programmers. While there is no absolute verdict in just yet, most agree Swift will be successful, even if it isn't the big leap Apple claims it to be.

For starters, Swift has a built-in demographic already waiting for it: all the iPhone and iPad users around the world. Swift is designed for the Apple ecosystem, an ecosystem that zealously accepts its own above all. Others have tried and failed, but it seems highly likely that Apple will enjoy a decent amount of success with Swift. In fact, Swift has already cracked top 10 on the PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language Index and has risen to No. 16 in the July TIOBE Index. 

"Google unveiled a language called Go in 2009, and though it was designed by some of the biggest names in the history of software design -- Ken Thompson and Rob Pike -- it's still struggling to gain a major following among the world's coders," reads a Wired article on why Swift will be change the programming landscape. "But Swift is a different animal. When it's officially released this fall, it could achieve mass adoption with unprecedented speed, surpassing even the uptake of Sun Microsystems' Java programming language and Microsoft's C# in the late 1990s and early 2000s."


Swift will accompany the release of iOS 8, which will most likely accompany the release of a new iPhone 6 (yep, the one that's supposed to have a larger 5.5-inch display). The iPhone 6 launch is expected to be one of the largest ever due to the option of a larger-screen iPhone on par with Android display sizes for the first time. Put two and two together, and Swift is pretty much set to hit the ground running. 

Developers have had both good and bad things to say about. Features like Playground, which allows developers to see their apps run in real time as they code, and the simplified language have many excited, but for some, they aren't good enough.

"Swift looks interesting, but in all of Overcast's development so far, I've never run into a problem that's the language's fault that Swift would have handled better," writes programmer Marco Arment in his blog The Developer's Dystopian Future. "It appears to solve problems I don't have, to gain small (and still theoretical) optimizations that I don't need, at the expense of many Objective-C features I really like."

"Simpler code is great, but less code that isn't actually simpler doesn't inherently help -- it's just harder to read, harder to learn, and more prone to hard-to-see bugs," Arment explained. 

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