Patch Notes #035 — Apple Wrote Us a New Language

WWDC happened and Apple casually announced a new programming language. Swift. Just, surprise, here’s a language: no more Objective-C bracket forests, real type inference, playgrounds where code runs as you type. The iOS devs at work made noises I’ve only heard at sporting events. One of them had spent three years mastering Objective-C’s weirdness and had a visible moment of grief before opening the Swift book that night. This industry: your expertise has a shelf life, your curiosity doesn’t. (Proverbs file. Growing.)

E3 is happening as I post. Plenty of announcements, but the console war scoreboard is clear: PS4 is lapping Xbox in sales, and Microsoft finally unbundled the Kinect to hit $399. Ten months after “TV TV TV,” the market has spoken fluently.

World Cup starts Thursday in Brazil. The office pool includes a live bracket on a whiteboard with betting rules of dubious legality. The German engineer seconded to our account from the client side is quietly confident in a way I find ominous.

TIL: Swift optionals. nil handled at the type level, so the compiler forces you to unwrap. After a year of Ruby’s undefined method for nil:NilClass at runtime, this feels like body armor.